Balazs Scheidler <bazsi@balabit.hu> writes:

The big question is whether these discussions should be moved to a separate list, or rather it should stay here.

Personally, I'd prefer to keep them together, for a few reasons, including, but not limited to: * While developing a feature, feedback from people who will use it is most valuable. I experienced this first hand during both the value-pairs() discussion, where we got a lot of very useful feedback from thist list, and I saw it happening earlier when I first posted the mongodb destination driver. Also, I got useful feedback too, when I posted my plans to rework the SQL destination driver. * There were cases where an error or problem was reported, and the result was a patch. Currently, that needs to be sent to one list only. But if user and development lists are separate, then the patch will end up on both. Which is not a problem per-se, but if someone's only subscribed to the devel list, there might be a bit of missing context. Not to mention that if someone has similar issues, and the patch is only posted to the devel list, that's tough luck. * The volume of patches isn't that high to warrant a separate list, in my opinion. If it ever increases to amounts that disrupt normal communication, then a separate list can still be created. But the strongest reason against a development list is - in my opinion - is that feedback from the community, even from those who are not interested in the code itself, only the functionality, is very valuable. I know I would feel a very strong urge to cross-post design ideas, because as a developer, I tend to see things a bit differently, and my experience so far has been that community feedback made my patches better. If it weren't for this list, value-pairs() wouldn't exist, and the mongodb driver would be very dumb and useless still, like it was when I first posted it. The $(substr) template function was also developed on this list, only partly by myself, based on a user request, and then enhanced by the requester. I don't think things like that would be so easy and straigthforward to do with a split list. I don't want to lose these things, the ability to ask the greater community for feedback - because in the end, they are the intended audience. But with separate lists, there's a risk I would, or that half my stuff would end up on this list anyway. In any case, I do not think that the volume of patches would be disruptive at the moment. There might come spikes, when the syslog-ng team at Balabit prepare their patches and send them to the list, but... that's not an incredible amount, either. -- |8]

On Tue, 2011-05-03 at 21:46 +0200, Balazs Scheidler wrote:

Hi,

I intend to make the development of syslog-ng even more transparent and this means that more and more patches and development related questions needs to be discussed. See for instance the last e-mail about linking options.

The big question is whether these discussions should be moved to a separate list, or rather it should stay here.

I don't have a definitive view, as I read both development and non-development discussions, but I guess there are others on this list, who couldn't care less about linking options, patches and whatnot. But even for a user, seeing what kind of features are development, might be useful information, even if the code itself is less interesting.

For me, it is more convinient as it is now.

The question is how you, the other list members think about it?

Please share your thoughts. Thanks.

I like the extra data. If it does not interest me, I can always delete it. -C