[web-devel] On moving Yesod-specific discussion to a separate list

[Michael Snoyman]

On Tue, Jun 28, 2011 at 4:47 AM, Chris Smith <cdsmith at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> On Jun 27, 2011 9:58 AM, "Blake Rain" <blake.rain at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>> I honestly don't see how Yesod - the same as Snap, Happstack, Hackyll
>> and so on - should not be discussed on a mailing list related to web
>> development in Haskell.
>
> I hope this isn't coming across like that... it's just that the mailing list
> is very often used as a basic support channel for Yesod, and that's not the
> case for any other project.  Definitely there's no need to exclude Yesod
> from the list, but there's a big difference between discussing web
> development topics including Yesod, and reporting Yesod bugs or asking
> detailed questions about technical topics like subsistence routing and
> such.  I'm very interested in Haskell web development including Yesod, but
> surely there's a Yesod specific place for the latter kinds of questions
> which frankly aren't even being understood by non-Yesod developers on the
> mailing list.  And of course the same thing would apply to Happstack, Snap,
> etc... except it isn't happening with them.

Well, bug reports are simple: they belong in the issue tracker. That's
where users are encouraged to report them. Let's look at a few other
"categories" of emails that come in:

"How do I do X": I agree with Greg that we should encourage users to
use Stack Overflow for this. We can update the Yesod site to make this
clear, but as should be obvious, no one on the Yesod team can actually
control where people send their questions.

Announcements: I don't think anyone has been arguing taking
announcements off of web-devel.

Yesod-specific development discussions: My guess is this is the real
issue we're going to end up debating. I've been pushing against
fragmentation in the community for a long time, and I think taking
these kinds of discussions off of web-devel will only promote
fragmentation. Case in point: the recent yesod-form discussion. I
absolutely wanted that discussion to be held where non-Yesod users
would see it, because I think there's still a lot of room for sharing
of ideas. And frankly, if you think you have nothing to gain from
seeing other people discussing libraries just because you don't use
them directly, you probably don't belong on the internet.

Discussions of any underlying, non-Yesod-specific library (WAI,
Persistent, etc): Again, if you're pushing to have this taken off of
web-devel, you're basically trying to create an echo chamber for your
own stuff. That's fine, but don't try to enforce that on the rest of
us. I still believe that having separate Snap and Happstack mailing
lists is not a good thing for the community, but if you really want to
have such distilled, focused conversations, please don't expect
web-devel to be the place for it.

Michael