OpenSSL project is considering to close this mailing list

[raf]

On Fri, Mar 17, 2023 at 05:09:26PM +0100, Tomas Mraz <tomas at openssl.org> wrote:

> On Fri, 2023-03-17 at 07:51 -0700, Job Cacka wrote:
> > 
> > First, by even mentioning the dissolution of this list you threaten
> > the long term viability of this list. It would have been better to
> > first look to the members of the list to solve the real problems in
> > the list. What are they?
> 
> The main problem we see is that there are many places where to go for
> OpenSSL related advice and it is unclear which place is the best if you
> want to ask some question. So then the question(s) either do not reach
> all the potential communities and users that could answer them or the
> questions are duplicated at all (or some) of the possible places which
> is ugly too.
> 
> That problem can be hardly solved by any other ways than by simply
> removing some of the places.
> 
> Now the question of course is whether that problem is so critical that
> fixing it is worth alienating existing users of the place that would be
> closed.
> 
> Without asking the question we would not even know how many users do
> not consider github as acceptable place to go to. So it was necessary
> to ask that question.

> -- 
> Tomáš Mráz, OpenSSL

A major problem with only having github as opposed to a
mailing list is that github is a website, so it's a
place that you need to go to. Mail just arrives. People
can participate in mailing lists for many different
projects (even if it's just staying aware of news and
issues and questions) every efficiently via email. With
github, participation would require active separate
conscious activity for each project that you are
interested in. It's inefficient. Also, github issues
aren't really suited to questions or users helping each
other, they are for reporting bugs. Not everything is a
bug report. Also, with a mailing list, more people are
potentially available to answer questions. With github,
it'll probably end up only being the developers
answering questions. Of course, all of the above statements
are really opinions. I have no evidence. :-)

Also, people can only ask questions on github if they
have a github account. All that is required to ask a
question on a mailing list is an email account. There
are many more people with email accounts than there are
with github accounts. Not all users of software are
themselves software developers.

cheers,
raf