As part of the introduction of community.lsst.org in RFC-85 we agreed that the DM mailing lists needed to be deprecated. At the same time, we wanted to ensure that communications got out reliably to people who aren’t on the forum, but are only subscribed to the mailing list.
With this, messages that would previously have gone to dm-devel should now occur on community.lsst.org; the Mailbot will ensure that your message gets out to everyone on the mail list.
Here’s how topics in categories are forwarded:
‘Data Management’ category → dm-devel@
‘DM Notifications’ category → dm-devel@
‘Announcements’ category → dm-announce@ (Update: disabled; see below)
Because of technical issues we aren’t yet passing the internal DM Team category to any mailing list, but would like to do so soon.
Again, only the first post in a topic is forwarded; subsequent conversation should happen entirely on community.lsst.org.
In the future we plan to extend the Mailbot to also bridge the Community forum and HipChat.
Thank you. I think this will make discourse more visible. I’m not sure how this fits in with deprecating the mailing lists. Is your plan to make the mailing lists “read only”, such that only discourse can post to them?
I think this would be the logical next step for dm-devel if there are no objections. I’m not sure if there would be a use case for being able to post to dm-announce independently of the forum; feedback on that, particularly from the leadership, would be good.
DM Notifications is meant to be a category for lightweight, high-frequency, announcements between DM developers (to say ‘I made a new thing,’ ‘this bug is fixed,’ or, 'here’s the new way of doing things’) that was separate from the more conversational Data Management category. That’s why DM Notifications isn’t going to dm-announce.
Since Community is a DM project, Announcements was originally envisioned as the channel for Stack Release announcements and other major ‘press release’ items. However, since we’re gradually integrating Community into the rest of the project, it makes sense to allow other subsystems to post into Announcements.
It would’t make sense to have a Stack Release category.
So, I guess if we want dm-announce to only be about Stack software releases, I could disconnect dm-announce from Community Mailbot and just tell the release manager to send an email to dm-announce in addition to Announcements on Community.
Update: Announcements no longer forwards to dm-announce@. If you want to post an announcement such as a stack release, conference announcement, job announcement, etc., I suggest that you manually cross-post to both.
Why would we want that? My thinking was that project-wide announcements thought to be suitable for Announcements would naturally be appropriate for dm-announce, and that anything important enough to go to dm-announce ought to go to the project as a whole anyway. Of course there might be other *-announce lists that Announcements postings would also go to.
ETA: but I’m OK with leaving it the way @jsick currently has it (no forwarding).
I wasn’t expecting to generate a lot of fuss. I was just saying that it seemed weird that announcements were forwarded to dm. I think you are saying that it is like this because there is only one announcement mailing list we would think of forwarding to at the moment but if more appeared then it would be possible to forward Announcements to multiple mailing lists.