On 03.02.2016 17:47, Carsten Otto wrote:
I like your proposal of splitting up the list. Having one list - no matter the name - where only AL admins post seems to be a good idea for certain announcements. Most projects have this, and I'm perfectly fine with that.
Having another list for mirror admins to reach the AL admins - maybe with some interested parties also reading those messages - also is necessary in most cases.
However, I don't really like mixing up the discussion and the mirror-admin-to-AL-admin cases. In the first case some kind of subscription is quite OK, but in the second case I as a mirror admin don't see the advantage of subscribing and changing settings.
I see I should have explained this more clearly. With whitelisting I mean that the list would be moderated and mails to the list can either be delivered because they are accepted by the mailing list admin or because the sender subscribed first. However, this is somewhat moot given I now want to implement the 3 list scheme proposed by Luchesar: - arch-mirrors would be a general discussion list - arch-mirrors-admins would be for mail from Arch Linux staff to mirror admins - arch-mirrors-announce would be for mail from you guys to our users (like downtime announcements) The last 2 would be moderated and only selected senders would be allowed to post. None of these lists really cover the mirror-admin-to-AL-admin case though. (more on that below) I'd also consider making the discussion list entirely open for posting from anyone, but this would not be in line with all our other lists so it would require some more discussion across all lists first. I dislike the idea of having different policies between lists so if I did this it should be for all lists. As for the mirror-admin-to-AL-admin case I think it's probably best if I publish the direct admin email I gave you. I'm unsure as to why you think this is mixed with the discussion list. The discussion list is really just intended for discussion where the sender wants outside opinions, not for mail that is only meant for Arch Linux staff. I'm not sure if anyone else is really interested in such discussion though or if all traffic should be directly with the mirro. Feedback welcome! We used to handle direct requests via our bug tracker, but I can see how that is inconvenient for mirror admins and I certainly see that email is better suited here. I will send an announcement with the direct email (mirrors@archlinux.org) once I split the lists.
Furthermore, there seem to be issues if such mails are sent out to more projects as AL (awaiting moderation because list is only mentioned in BCC?).
Either because of BCC or because the mail has too many recipients. Mailman dislike both of these.
Could you explain where you see the advantage of having mirror admins use a mailing list interface, with subscriptions, configuration changes, and possible moderation/filtering/acknowledgement issues (compared to a plain mail address that is forwarded to AL admins)?
If mirror admins send their mail to a list we don't have to intervene and thus users get their information quicker and we don't need additional manpower. I'm currently taking care of mirrors on my own and the work load is really minimal. This might change if I start forwardings mails. Also pacman (the most important software that uses our mirror URLs) supports multiple URLs in it's mirror list. It will automatically try the next mirror if it is unable to connect to one or if a file is missing. Assuming users list multiple mirrors, the impact of downtime is thus rather small. That being said I am not entirely happy with the current setup where users get a list of all direct mirror URLs and we can not control which ones they use. I believe it makes it really difficult for new mirrors to start being used and it is also practically impossible to properly balance traffic according to mirror bandwidth. I haven't thought about how this could be done better though because I don't really have the time to work on this issue at the moment. Considering the points above, I'm not even sure if we need downtime notifications for users. When I took over as the Arch Linux mirror admin, I just noticed that some mirror admins send downtime notification to this list (most don't) and I didn't think about it. Any feedback by users that read such notification is welcome. Does this mail address your concerns? I'm unsure if I have understood everything correctly. Thanks for the feedback! Florian