[drats_users] D-RATS 0.3.0b1 (!)

[Dan Smith]

Hi Arnold,

I am copying the mailing list on my reply.  I hope you don't mind, but
I really think this is something that needs to be decided by the
group.

Arnold said:

> Now that the reporting problem feature is implemented, about 90% of
> the drats_users email gets instantly deleted by me.  I want to
> suggest you make a "drats_tester" group or something else for all
> this stuff.
>
> I honestly feel that I should unsubscribe to drats_users for a
> while. This wouldn't be good.  Our Ham club is supporting a 216 mile
> bicycle ride (with 20,000+ feet of climbing) this weekend, and our
> primary data transfer method is going to be D-Rats.  Tim K6BIV has
> asked us to do a report on our experiences after the event.  I
> honestly feel that the 20 or so emails from drats_users every day is
> way to excessive, however I saw that there were some nice fixes to
> the 0.2.11b versions that appear to be corrections to some of what
> we've seen in our testing.  I never bothered to report the problems
> to what we saw, and appeared to be a problem since virtually every
> problem reported was about 0.3.  

By my count, there have been 39 mails related to tickets since April
1st.  A good chunk of that is actually discussion around tickets, but
comes out to an average of 3 per day.

I really don't want to move any serious discussion off to another list
because I think that's what most people want to see and I don't want
to require everyone to subscribe to another.  I also don't think there
is enough discussion to justify two lists.

A lot of communities have an "announce" list where there is no
discussion, only announcements about releases and important bugs.
Would it help if I created a "drats_announce" list that I copy on all
formal and beta release announcements?  Reports from the issue tracker
and general discussion would not appear on that list, only such
notifications.  I'd be happy to set this up and think it would be a
good solution for people looking for a slow trickle of update-type
information.

> Something needs to change, but you're the boss, so it's up to you.

I'm not the boss on this.  The mailing list is for me to communicate
things out to a wider audience and provide a place for discussion
among users.  This is precisely why I asked for input weeks ago on
copying the list on tracker updates -- I got nothing but votes for the
positive.  I'd really prefer not to change the nature of drats_users,
but I'm happy to create ancillary lists as necessary.

Does anyone else have a comment about how to improve this?

-- 
Dan Smith
dsmith#danplanet.com, s/#/@/
www.danplanet.com
KK7DS