We need a central place for core contributors broadcast their business

I agree. +1. +100000. Every communication channel previously reserved for core devs is becoming a support channel.

There needs to be a dedicated core dev channel, and a mailing list is a good place to start.

I would say that an automated system is probably not a good way to go though. Any random joe can register an account on d.o and say +1 on a core issue and be automatically added to the core mailing list. I'd say make it invite only. Or have people request access or something.

I'm all for a core-dev-only channel. I don't think we need to be draconian in enforcing who gets on it, though, just what gets posted. I joined the development@ list long before I was actually a core developer, and that helped me to become one. The important thing is that it's clearly marked, and enforced, as "discussion of development of Drupal core itself", and anything else is not allowed.

See also: #1163962: Update mailing list descriptions

That was a problem with the development list. The title was ambiguous. If we title the new list something like "core-development" or something, it'll be more clear what we're trying to accomplish.

@Crell, how would you go about "enforcing" the topic on a mailing list? I don't see a good way to do that.

Are we voting? If so, this one gets my tremendously huge +1. Heck, I'll even join it just so I can ignore the emails like I do the regular developer's list. ;)

The current dev list _is_ the core dev list. If anything we need a "other-dev" or whatever list.

The problem is that the current development list has been abused to be something other than core development. The "core" part of it has been unenforced for so long that the list has become unfocused. It will be significantly easier to put a label on the development list to represent what it actually is ("Contrib development + misc noob support requests, nigerian prince inheritance scams, and job postings") and create a new core dev list than it will be to refocus the existing development list.

One cannot take something called 'development' which has thousands of Drupal developers subscribing and participating in development-y topics, and then wrist-slap-moderate them *all* away if they discuss anything other than Drupal Core stuff.

The development@drupal.org list is for development of Drupal. If we want something for core development, it must be named appropriately in order to encourage enforcement of same. :)

Sorry, chx, but #drupal was only "lost" because you and others refused to fight for it.

Seems, we are about to lose our support section too: #1236290: Decide on a course of action for improving support options on Drupal.org

Why not switch this site to typo3 while we are at it and mv our git repos to github?

I don't think there's any hope in reclaiming development@, just as I don't think there's hope in reclaiming #drupal as non-support channels. We collectively let this slide (or in the case of #drupal, made an explicit decision) and at this point I see reclaiming the culture of these places is a lost battle.

I definitely see the problem though, and I'd be fine with a core-conversations@drupal.org or something similar, so +1. I would ideally prefer a g.d.o group so we could do targeted cross-posting/notifications (e.g. bring in the Performance group for talking about the D8 performance gates), but g.d.o notifications apparently totally suck which makes this a barrier to participation (I'm still waiting for someone who claims this to actually make an issue about it, btw. :\)

However, I'm very much against locking people out of participating/reading the discussions, especially if we're hoping to move most major discussions there. One of the key strengths of the Drupal community is that major decisions are transparent and open and there's no barrier to participation and comment. So I'd prefer to start with a list with a clear-cut definition (which the development@ list lacks) and "social pressure" style enforcement ("Please stay on topic, blah blah") and see where that goes. We could always make the list moderated in the future if we had to.

I had a part of discussion with webchick in 2008 - the name "development" is too vague for what is supposed to be and needs to be a highly focused & effective discussion. If the discussion is to be for "Drupal core" then the mailing list name itself needs to be focused, e.g. "core@drupal.org" (short) or "core-conversations@drupal.org" (verbose, but follows the naming convention used at Drupalcon).

Related to #1236290: Decide on a course of action for improving support options on Drupal.org

Edit: Whoops, posted this to the wrong issue. it's sort of related, in that chx opened both as part of a plan to improve the contribution workflow.

+1 to a core@drupal.org list. No other fences beyond a proactive and polite "No, off topic, go elsewhere" to support questions. (Sending contrib help questions to development@ is not unreasonable. Sending them to core@, that's past the threshold where you get the benefit of the doubt.)

As for a g.d.o group... I hate using g.d.o in general. :-)

The high performance group on groups.drupal.org is part of the problem. It is 90% support requests, 9% job postings, and 1% actual discussion, and that discussion is almost never about Drupal development (more "have you tried X commercial service?").

Most people actually working on Drupal performance do not follow the group, hence the performance gate discussion has been pretty morose in general, and about half the people posting on it were people I explicitly pinged in irc or via e-mail asking chime in (they might have found it anyway, not sure).

I hate e-mail but I also hate using groups.drupal.org, so I'll just go along with whatever gets set up.

One possibility for a name would be #drupal-contribute to match the irc channel - but sometimes (not always) this also ends up being a 'contrib support channel' or 'please review my project application' channel and I would hope that would be completely off-topic if there's a new mailing list. I wouldn't want to stop discussions like improving qa.drupal.org or drush etc. though.

However if it's a choice between core@drupal.org and nothing let's do it and see how it goes.

I think the idea here was to create a list that was exclusively about core development.

I think it's a good idea to create some other list about 'please review my project application' or qa.drupal.org or drush: basically, things that are of high importance to the community, but not necessarily "core development".

@cweagans: that works :)

I think this is a good idea, but I like @catch's idea of a 'drupal-contribute' list even better. One of the nice things about the old development list (when I used to actually read it) was the mix of people with different perspectives. If it's just "core developers" talking about core you might not get the same cross-pollination of ideas.

The volume of mail could still be kept low by emphasizing that the list is mainly for discussion of big overarching topics (rather than minutiae which belongs in the issue queue). I wish I had a good idea for how to name the list to make that clear in the name, but none are coming to me at the moment.

On the technology side of the question, I think a g.d.o group would be great if g.d.o would work well for people to get email notifications. With email lists, finding old conversations, and especially trying to participate in them is impossible, but this all works with web based conversations. Node 8 landed in Drupal 7, right? (http://drupal.org/node/8). Building on the existing conversation to be brought forward by newcomers would possible because they could just continue on the existing path. Not all out conversations time-lasting that much, but many might be so. However I do see people have issues with g.d.o notifications (although they worked well for me so far in my initiative), and it is probably not a good idea to postpone introduction of a more focused channel on site development work on g.d.o, so I'm not against making it a mailing list then, just pondering about the effects it has.

On groups, http://groups.drupal.org/improvements-core has been around for a long time, and while it stays on-topic 99% of the time, that is mostly because it is extremely low traffic - 214 members is not that much really.

Cross-linking #1163962: Update mailing list descriptions, which originally attempted to re-purpose the current development list to core only.

There does seem to be a lot of controversy around this issue.

IMHO, simplest solution would be to create a "third-party developers" list, and just send people there. I personally would welcome that, and it would save a lot of hard feelings, both from core developers who are resentful that their list has been overrun, and from third-party developers who have been told (essentially) to fuck off.

I'll gladly open an issue requesting it. Where should I do that?

Sub.

Subscribe and +1.

One possibility for a name would be #drupal-contribute to match the irc channel - but sometimes (not always) this also ends up being a 'contrib support channel' or 'please review my project application' channel and I would hope that would be completely off-topic if there's a new mailing list.

Since contrib development is on topic for that IRC channel, I would advise against using that for a name if you want it to be off topic for the mailing list to avoid confusion. I know that I, personally, feel like I'm contributing when I work on my contrib modules...

Michelle

Sometimes people use #drupal-contribute to discuss development of contrib modules, that is great and I think it could happen on the same list as core same as in irc (although I'd also be OK with a core-only list if only to try it for a bit). In fact I've discussed contrib modules with Michelle in there and that would be the exact opposite of what I meant by "contrib support" it was more longer-term planning.

However there have also been some help vampires on #drupal-contribute who asked the same question many dozens of times and ignored the answers, but were not told they were off-topic for a very long time because the questions were vaguely related to a project application. Also asked the questions at different times of day when different people were online.

I was not sure what to do in the specific situation I'm thinking about, afaik I technically have irc ops but have never used it, and would feel bad kicking someone if they are technically contributing even if they were in fact sucking blood out of the channel.

It doesn't happen enough in #drupal-contribute yet to be a massive issue, but some days it has been quite bad. It's that which I would hope a new mailing list would have strict rules against - because if I sign up to core@drupal.org it is going to be part of my mail inbox which is a bit harder to ignore than irc backscroll.

I'll probably rather rename the current one to core and create a new one for the other but the names are fine with me.

Or maybe I'll create two new ones and import the list of subscribers to both.

Oops. Thought I already did this.

To summarize:

• Many core developers are no longer subscribed to the current development@lists.drupal.org, because too many developers working with Drupal are posting too many development and programming support questions.
• Despite having conversations in the Drupal core issue queue and on groups.drupal.org already, there is a desire of core developers to re-instantiate arbitrary or cross-topic mail threads about Drupal core development only.
• While general core conversations on groups.drupal.org would be generally preferable, the site has serious bugs and problems with subscriptions/notifications, which are known for several years already, so the idea of having core conversations on groups.drupal.org would be a matter of waiting some more years until we can do them in a way that works.
• We had a similar situation in IRC, where #drupal and #drupal-dev existed previously, but the former is the entry point for everyone searching for "drupal" on IRC, hence very busy and noisy, and the latter had only occasional conversations, lacking a clear purpose. We changed the IRC channels to make #drupal general purpose, and moved all conversations about contributing to Drupal core and contributed projects into #drupal-contribute, so both have a clear purpose and topic now.
• The proposal is to do a similar change for our development mailing list. I.e., retain the current list as general purpose entry point for everyone developing with Drupal (which is very common to have across FOSS projects in general), but have a separate mailing list for discussions on Drupal core only.
• We discussed only briefly whether the list should be core@lists.drupal.org, or whether it should be contribute@lists.drupal.org, following the idea of the #drupal-contribute channel. The proposal is to have a core@lists.drupal.org, and this can probably be explained in two points:
  1. We rarely (never) see actual mail threads discussing "contributions" on the development list in the first place. While the IRC channel #drupal-contribute also serves for contributed projects and contributing to Drupal in general, developers most likely wouldn't use the mailing list to discuss future development of a contributed module - they'd rather use the project's issue queue.
  2. Drupal core is a much more complex beast, and we clearly lack a simple discussion space that's focused on core development currently. Thus, the proposal to name it "core" includes the purpose of actually limiting it to core conversations.

With all that being said, @killes@www.drop.org: I'd highly recommend to leave the current development@lists.drupal.org untouched. Just create a new core@lists.drupal.org. KISS.

Thanks for the summary, sun. One nit.

"the site has serious bugs and problems with subscriptions/notifications, which are known for several years already"

Please, please point to specific issues that document this problem, so that we know greggles is aware of them, and someone could at least conceivably spin up a gdo test site to work on them.

I know merlinofchaos has said in the past that the g.d.o emails don't work for him. Something about the headers? Maybe ask him?

Michelle

I'm also in support of core@lists.drupal.org or core@drupal.org mailing list. Let's get it setup.

I've requested the appropriate actions from OSL.

Awesome :)

YAY! Thanks killes!

Michelle: Since I'm not the one who wants to solve this problem with 1970s technology ;) I would prefer one of the mailing list advocates do the leg work here to explain why g.d.o/drupal-initiatives can't work.

> With email lists, finding old conversations, and especially trying to participate in them is impossible, but this all works with web based conversations.

> Since I'm not the one who wants to solve this problem with 1970s technology ;)

1970s technology -- you took the words out of my mouth! :)

sub

> For instance "Triggering Form Submit" is a recent support list submission. Using my favorite search engine, I find the conversation thread easily.

And how do you reply to it, once you've found it on the list archive? I find mailing lists put up too many barriers to inclusion. And while we don't want the noise of the whole world jumping in with Drupal support questions and where's my cat, we do want people to be able to get involved, and having barriers is a bad way to try to prevent noise.

Please, stop all discussion over whether a mailing list makes sense or not. The decision has been made, the list created. We only wait for whitelisting the addresses.

Right, that's exactly what I'm asking for: actionable issues posted to the http://drupal.org/project/issues/groupsdrupalorg issue queue instead of unconstructive rants about gdo all the time from e-mail lovers. :P

This issue isn't quite done yet. Killes has given me ownership of development@ and core@ (and support@ too, damn him ;)) so I can make whatever tweaks to the wording and stuff. We're going to work that out in IRC now. Also, core [at] drupal.org doesn't actually work and results in an access denied, so I need to talk to Narayan about that, I think.

Also, http://lists.drupal.org/mailman/listinfo/developer-support is just confusing the issue and I would love to see that removed. I do not have access to do this though; needs to be killes.

Ok. There was an EPIC discussion on IRC tonight with catch, chx, msonnabaum, jthorson, and others that stemmed from trying to write up the guidelines for this new list. (Draft at http://piratepad.net/mSDVTPQnZg)

It was really easy to itemize things we *didn't* want on this list: bug reports, support requests, begging for patch reviews, etc. However, itemizing things we *did* want on this list was a lot trickier. And we ran smack into the following problem:

We currently use a mix of things to accomplish the ??? on that flowchart:

1. "Meta" issues in the issue queue
2. Posts to g.d.o working groups
3. IRC discussions
4. Rants on our blogs that are piped to Drupal Planet
5. Whining on Twitter
6. Private emails/skype chats

This proposal would also open up a new option:

7. The core@drupal.org list.

So what is likely to happen if we go ahead with this plan as outlined is just an extenuation of the problem we have right now. Some discussions will get forked into the mailing list, some into the issue queue, others into g.d.o... and you'll still have the general problem of people getting blindsided by things because they had no idea the discussion was being had but THIS time it was in place 1 instead of 7... Mailing lists also have real collaboration problems (you miss all the discussions that happened previous to the day you joined the list, you can't reply to a discussion that happened 3 weeks ago to add some new bit of information, etc.) leading further to this "blindsiding" problem.

It really feels like this new list needs to be more like an "announcement only" list that points people to important discussions happening wherever the most appropriate place is to find more information/participate in the discussion, probably favouring "meta" issues because we at least know from Drupal versions 1 through 7 that developers can use issue queues :) (chx and catch are working on a possible implementation plan in a new issue - please send bikesheds over there, not here).

Thoughts?

Ok, after *yet* another EPIC discussion on IRC, we actually don't think we need this list at all. Ha.

Here's what we propose:

1. Create a new "core" group on groups.drupal.org for core announcements.
2. Add everyone in MAINTAINERS.txt to the moderator list. (Others such as D8 initiative owners could be added by consensus of 3 or more admins)
3. Make the group postable by group managers only.
4. Pipe the RSS feed to Drupal Planet and @drupalplanet.
5. All nodes that get posted here get comments turned off, forcing them to be pointers to other places (issues, groups discussions) where people can actually participate.
6. If you want one of your issues posted to this group, ping one of the group managers in IRC.

This has the following advantages:
- Moderated by the very people who build core, so pretty much guaranteed to be high-quality traffic and support request free. ;)
- Discussions can be held wherever it's most appropriate: g.d.o, d.o issue queues, etc.
- Announcements can be tagged, for folks who are only interested in following a subset of them.
- Posts are searchable on both drupal.org and groups.drupal.org.
- No forking of discussions happening elsewhere.
- Easy to tell who the managers are of the list by the block/view on the side.
- Planet/Twitter integration for free.

For email subscriptions, one can use http://www.feedmyinbox.com/. http://notify.me , http://blogtrottr.com or any similar email-to-RSS service. If this is not good enough, please help with fixing #1187832: Allow "announcement only" groups.

If it's any consolation it took about 6 hours in irc to come up with the current plan, and the only reason for changing the plan was because it turned out to be impossible to write the description for the new mailing list, and that discussion turned into this.

I'm going to move this to the Drupal core queue since there are no infrastructure changes required for this except for cleaning up the lists (sorry again killes).

> If it's any consolation it took about 6 hours in irc to come up with the current plan

It's a good plan! :D

I'm a little confused on this new group. I see 38 members but no join link. I have access to add myself in the back door but don't want to be going against protocol. :) Is it allowed for non-core-devs to join the group, just not post in it? It would be handy for me to have the posts there show up on my g.d.o "recent" list, which is why I want to join it.

Michelle

Michelle, we're waiting on #1187832: Allow "announcement only" groups to make groups not invite only so users can subscribe, get emails and all the other g.d.o perks. We need testing! :)

The next important task for this idea will be to fix the +1 subscribe problem,.. so issue queues can be lean and clean.

Can we remove this discussion from Drupal core and move it back to Drupal webmasters?

Also, for @rump idea, is there any plan to add flags to issues (and core issues) any time soon?

Since this didn't get any feedback on this proposal in over 2 weeks, and since chx and I are conveniently sitting next to each other, I'm calling this good.

- Group set up at http://groups.drupal.org/core
- Maintainers.txt members added to admin list.
- Feed piped to Drupal Planet.
- Initial post created.

Now, we just need to remove the Core mailing list, which is no longer needed. Passing back to infra queue.

Awesome. Just need to finish og_announce module now so we can get email updates. That hasn't had any action in over two weeks also, yet there is a patch ready that has been minimally reviewed. Can we knock this out?

I have g.d.o dev sites minimally working over at #1241756: I want a GROUPS.drupal.org development site for …. There might be some rough edges since this is the first time we have used them for this site, and the logs were not totally clean. If anyone wants to use them, they should work just like all the others, http://drupal.org/node/1018084.

Do we still need a core@ list removed or anything? I think this issue is long-since fixed...

Yep, this is now done via g.d.o/core which seems to be working well for us.

@webchick It would be nice to reevaluate g.d.o/core and see how we can improve its visibility. As I am sure its missed a lot by many,

Hm. I'm not sure how. It's broadcast to https://twitter.com/drupalcore (~5500 followers), and Drupal Planet (50K+ followers). Then the "This Week in Core" posts that also include posts from g.d.o/core are re-broadcast to both Drupal Planet (again) and also to @drupal (~47K followers) weekly.

Not sure what else we can really improve there. :)