On Thu, Oct 19, 2023 at 03:57:35PM +0200, Jaroslav Kysela wrote:
I'm told that a while back there were some discussions to migrate this list to vger, but the process never really got finalized.
I would like to restart this discussion again, because I am in the middle of vger list migrations and it seems like an opportune moment to bring this up.
There are the following benefits to gain after migration:
- it becomes an open list that doesn't require much moderator involvement
I think that it may be the main reason to migrate it. How do you handle the inbound spam? It's the only reason, why our mailing list is moderated.
We do allow a small amount of spam through, unfortunately, but the combination of aggressive blocklist checking, spam filtering, and strict content policies allow us to keep that volume pretty low (1-2 messages a week for most lists).
- we can try to set up a forward from the old address, but previous attempts to do so with mailman had mixed results
- if the old address is set up to forward mail to the new address, then anyone sending to both addresses will get doubles of everything, which can be annoying
- setting up a hard bounce at the old address would probably be preferable, but it's a "ripping off the bandaid" kind of approach
Ideally, the e-mail address of the list should be preserved, but I guess that an option to redirect DNS MX records to LF servers is not possible, right?
Well, it's possible, but that would require us handling all of alsa-project.org mail, and it's probably not what you want. We *can* set things up so we treat alsa-project.org as an internal relay, and then you just pass alsa-devel@alsa-project.org to our lists server, but this is somewhat fragile as well.
There's a third option -- instead of migrating the alsa-devel list, we can migrate all activity to linux-sound@vger.kernel.org. It's an existing list that currently sees about 5 messages a year (and most of them are cc'd to alsa-devel anyway).
The process would be:
1. Set up https://patchwork.kernel.org/project/alsa-devel/ to source from two lists instead of just alsa-devel (we do this already for netdev, which sources from both netdev and bpf lists) 2. Change all MAINTAINERS entries from alsa-devel to linux-sound 3. Eventually, this will result in almost no patches being sent to alsa-devel, at which point we can evaluate if the alsa-devel list sees little enough traffic that it can just be closed or redirected
I think this option is worth considering because it will achieve the desired effect of removing moderation on submitted patches, keep existing maintainer workflows, and not require actually migrating the alsa-devel list.
Thoughts?
-K