Comments on: What Belongs on “Announce”?

By: Lars

Lars — Fri, 10 Apr 2009 20:13:40 +0000

Just an idea that for sure needs more brainstorming – but first start with the background.

People installing openSUSE for the first time get the “well known popup” during their first login – OK. We tell people that they should create an account on opensuse.org to participate in the wiki, bugzilla, forums, … We invite them to many places of opensuse.org – and even I didn’t know every subdomain like:

* apparmor.opensuse.org,
* crashdb.opensuse.org or
* lizards.opensuse.org
* …

Looks like openSUSE developers again and again fall into the trap creating lots of tools and ideas without informing their users about the great stuff they do. (Sidenote: what about a list of such subdomains with their background information in the weekly news? -> Zonker, please drive this

Now: we have already a page called users.opensuse.org, what about enhancing this as a central place for users to manage their openSUSE account and get more informations if they want?

For example:
* general mailinglist subscription management
* subscription to specialized newsletters (weekly news, updates for their distro, announcements, …) they are currently send via opensuse-announce, perhaps we can deliver them also separately, if the moderators of opensuse-announce “tag” them?
* location management (think about “openSUSE people in your neighborhood, if people can add and search GEO-Information
* hermes integration (for developers manly, but better to have it here IMO)
* trust system integration
* …

Perhaps this is something for openfate.opensuse.org (next subdomain candidate – perhaps this should be discussed on opensuse-project@opensuse.org, first. What do you think?

With kind regards – and happy easter
Lars

By: Zonker

Zonker — Tue, 17 Mar 2009 11:14:54 +0000

“And, no offense, but I think the -announce mail that I disliked the most in recent times was the announcement of the KDE 4.2 Factory packages. The -announce list should be used for official matters, announcing the KDE 4.2 Factory packages might have caused a good deal of people to think those are officially supported, reliable and tested packages – which they most certainly are not. They shouldn’t be recommended to casual users, they’re a service for geeks who wish to experiment, test and know what they’re doing.”

Why would I be offended? I asked for the feedback.

The flip side is that some people *want* to see announcements like that pushed out to show that we do provide those packages quickly. But, if we do a similar announcement in the future, I’d be sure to state very emphatically that the packages are unofficial…

By: cb400f

cb400f — Tue, 17 Mar 2009 08:22:31 +0000

I think the -announce list should only be used for important announcements that are of interest to almost everybody – such as releases, problems with the redirector or other important news.

The usual bi-weekly meetings of individual teams shouldn’t even be on -announce imo. Maybe on the rare occasion that something particularly important is on the agenda – but not every god damn meeting with nothing going on – the topic mailing lists and news.o.o should be enough to announce those. I also think that the weekly news announcement is borderline spam on the announce list. Announcing something as trivial as a meeting summary is downright offensive to -announce subscribers imo.

And, no offense, but I think the -announce mail that I disliked the most in recent times was the announcement of the KDE 4.2 Factory packages. The -announce list should be used for official matters, announcing the KDE 4.2 Factory packages might have caused a good deal of people to think those are officially supported, reliable and tested packages – which they most certainly are not. They shouldn’t be recommended to casual users, they’re a service for geeks who wish to experiment, test and know what they’re doing.