Time to split the mailing list?

[Colin McMillen]

> Agreed that this will have to be done eventually; when it is done,
> what it will probably mean in practice is that the release notes (or
> other documentation) will probably need to be more verbose in
> explaining what has changed between the versions with more detail,
> since it will no longer be possible to assume most of the user space
> is subscribed to the developer's mailing list.

Indeed, it's foolish in general to assume that users either 

a) read the mailing list
b) track the latest version of hg (either the main selenic repo or crew)

Even though I subscribe to the mailing list, I don't read all the
conversations (especially not the "outgoing changesets" emails when
there are several dozens of changesets at once). And many people will
only install a "release" version of hg. 

I don't know if you have any number of stats on the number of hg
downloads vs. the number of people on the mailing list, but my
experience with OSS projects of similar size indicates that maybe 1/10
to 1/100 of the userbase actually participates (by subscribing to
mailing lists, signing up for web forums, making wiki accounts, etc.)

So even though there isn't a 1.0 release yet, it would surprise me if
more than 25% of hg's users read the mailing list.

From my extraordinarily scientific sample size of 4, I can in fact
conclude that exactly 25% of users read the mailing list. :)

- Colin
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: not available
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 191 bytes
Desc: Digital signature
Url : http://www.selenic.com/pipermail/mercurial/attachments/20060506/e13feb2b/attachment.pgp