Mercurial notifications

[Jonathan Gibbons]

Mark Reinhold wrote:
> Some have expressed the concern, privately, that this results in people
> receiving too many messages in which they're not actually interested.
> There are (at least) a couple of ways to deal with this:
>
>   - People can filter the incoming messages (look for the X-Hg-URL
>     header, which points back to the repository for which the
>     notification was generated); or
>
>   - We could create an additional list for each forest and arrange to
>     send Mercurial notifications to those lists only.  People could
>     then subscribe to those lists, or subscribe to the appropriate
>     per-repository RSS feeds (broken at the moment, but to be fixed
>     soon), or live in peaceful ignorance.
>
> So, what do people think?  Should we create separate per-forest lists for
> Mercurial notifications, do nothing, or do something else?

Filtering messages is inconvenient and if most people are filtering them 
out, then
that is a symptom that something is wrong in the first place.   For my 
part, I use
three different mail readers depending on time of day and where I am, to 
keep
track of mail, and it makes it more annoying to have to set up and 
maintain filters
on each system. I also know (from private communication) that some 
people have
unsubscribed from -dev lists because of the increased mail traffic.

Also, filtering does not apply to the mail archives, If you look at the 
compiler-dev
archive, for example, it is now dominated by hg messages.
http://mail.openjdk.java.net/pipermail/compiler-dev/2008-March/subject.html#start
In addition, the hg messages to compiler-dev are duplicated on 
serviceability-dev ...
http://mail.openjdk.java.net/pipermail/serviceability-dev/2008-March/subject.html
and core-libs-dev ...
http://mail.openjdk.java.net/pipermail/core-libs-dev/2008-March/subject.html
Would it not make more sense to have the hg messages that go to all 
these aliases
instead go to a separate alias to which people can choose to subscribe 
or not.

Finally, relevance and interest. There are over 200 people subscribed to the
compiler-dev list (my favorite example of course.) Of those, there are only
a few who can put back changes and who may be interested in all the change
messages. There may be some more that may be interested in messages related
to updates to the compiler itself.  Which probably leaves 60%-70% of people
subscribed to the alias for any interesting discussion regarding compiler
development and who probably are not interested in any putback messages at
all.

-- Jon