Published on: 2015-08-20T00:21:06+00:00
In an email exchange, Jorge Timón suggests that technical people tend to avoid noise on mailing lists while non-technical people follow the noise. Bryan Bishop responds, stating he is fine with receiving everything through a single mailing list. He likens it to reading the Wikipedia firehose of recent edits and thinks having a raw feed would be valuable for future developers. However, he also suggests that weekly summaries of research and development activity would be useful to summarize recent work.On August 20, 2015, NxtChg via bitcoin-dev revealed that Jorge Timón had made the most posts with a total of 72. Despite believing that his posts were on-topic, he acknowledged that some repetition could have been avoided. His focus has been on linking to threads or documents to make his comments shorter. However, he admitted that most of his posts centered around general consensus topics rather than specific Bitcoin Core development issues. In light of this, he apologized for setting an unplanned record. The conversation took place in the context of a discussion about separating the bitcoin-consensus and bitcoin-dev lists.It is suggested that every mailing list should have its own internal SNR discussions. In August, Jorge Timón made the most number of posts with 72, followed by Hector Chu with 36 and Thomas Zander with 32. Pieter Wuille posted 27 times, while Eric Lombrozo and Mark Friedenbach each had 24 posts. Adam Back, Btc Drak, and Peter Todd all had 18 posts while jl2012 had 17 and odinn with 16. Gavin Andresen had 15 posts while Venzen Khaosan and Michael Naber both had 12. Anthony Towns had 11 posts and Tom Harding and Gregory Maxwell each had 10. Anybody else on the mailing list had less than 10 posts in August.The Bitcoin developers, including Wladimir, Greg, Peter Todd, Pieter, and Alex Morcos, have been discussing options for improving the signal noise ratio on the bitcoin-dev list. One solution suggested was to divide it into multiple mailing lists, but it was pointed out that the less technical Bitcoin discussion list already existed in the past and nobody used it. Instead, the discussion turned toward instituting on-topic guidelines for bitcoin-dev. Gavin, Wladimir, and a few others agreed to a simple few paragraphs written by Alex Morcos, which would be posted by Wladimir. The risk of having too many lists is interested stakeholders will miss discussions. We could reduce the off-topic/noise of bitcoin-dev considerably by offloading the non-technical/academic debate to the Bitcoin list. It just needs a bit of shepherding. One proposal is to respond when something is off-topic and offer a different place for the topic. However, no one has been implementing this yet because they don't have a strong handle on what is off-topic and what isn't. Thus, it is important to establish norms which requires some relative humility, courage, and honesty.Several developers, including Wladimir, Greg, Peter Todd, Pieter, and Alex Morcos, have been discussing ways to improve the signal-to-noise ratio on the bitcoin-dev list. One proposal was to split the list into multiple mailing lists, but it was pointed out that a less technical Bitcoin discussion list already existed in the past but had not been used. The discussion moved towards instituting on-topic guidelines for bitcoin-dev instead of creating yet another mailing list. Gavin, Wladimir, and a few others agreed to a few paragraphs written by Alex Morcos, which Wladimir agreed to post. Btc Drak suggested offloading non-technical/academic debate to the bitcoin list to reduce the off-topic noise of bitcoin-dev. This would require some shepherding, and he expressed willingness to help out. It was suggested that general discussions had little use on bitcoin-dev because there were no rules to force them over to the bitcoin list. The discussion also touched on the idea of establishing two lists, but many felt that it would not make much difference as long as Bitcoin Core remained the reference client. There were questions about who the moderators for the bitcoin list were and whether sourceforge was the best platform for the list.A discussion is taking place on whether to establish two separate mailing lists for Bitcoin protocol and Bitcoin Core discussions. However, Jeff Garzik thinks that having multiple lists will not make much difference as long as Bitcoin Core remains the reference client. He also suggests that there haven't been any rules in place for -dev to force general discussion over to the Bitcoin list. Garzik believes that offloading non-technical/academic debates to the Bitcoin list could significantly reduce the off-topic/noise on the bitcoin-dev list. Additionally, he mentions that it just needs a bit of shepherding and he would be happy to help out.
Updated on: 2023-08-01T15:33:32.771042+00:00