OpenSSL project is considering to close this mailing list

[James Chapman]

TLDR; please keep the mailing list

Education: the manageable traffic on the list gives a wealth of information on OpenSSL, the issues people have, and the excellent responses. These can be read at leisure on many platforms (including off-line). This is probably the best form of support for the OpenSSL community.

Accessibility: the simple text format makes it available to many/all including the ability to translate sections should that be needed.

Participation: you are notified when there is a message and you can scan quickly to see whether you can help. Messages are threaded as per your email client. Suppose people check GitHub once a week; that will slow down the information flow. Less frequent posters may never bother checking GitHub unless they have a problem. It is possible someone has an issues I have previously experienced; with the email list I will know about it and can help.

Historical perspective, I used to use NNTP with a simple threaded news client. I could keep up to date with many topics in a way that suited me. Over the years various groups moved to web based forums. The result was discussion and participation all but died. Email is a good alternative - I can choose what to subscribe to and use local tools to help manage how I want that information presented.

“many places where to go for OpenSSL related advice” - isn’t that a good thing? People can use the mechanism that works for them, or the mechanism they first find. One approach is to remove places where there is little ongoing activity - i.e. let the participants decide. If the mailing list has dropped to 10 subscribers then people are probably not finding it useful. Also consider what works well for those who post the helpful responses.

How easy is it to keep track of new threads and unread responses in GitHub?

I feel the mailing list helps form part of the OpenSSL community. Adding issues to GitHub represents a different participation model (customer/supplier).

James

> On 17 Mar 2023, at 10:04, Tomas Mraz <tomas at openssl.org> wrote:
> 
> Hello all openssl-users mailing list contributors,
> 
> as the focus of the OpenSSL users and developers community is now on
> the OpenSSL project GitHub page [1] we are considering closing this
> mailing list. We would like to move to using Issues [2] and Pull
> requests [3] in GitHub to discuss topics and ask questions related to
> using and developing  OpenSSL in a single location as this provides
> better tracking and searching and we believe this will help us serve
> our community better.
> 
> We would still keep the mailing list read-only so the archives of the
> discussions are not lost.
> 
> We are seeking input on this potential change if you are currently
> actively contributing on openssl-users mailing list discussion and you
> believe such a change would substantially reduce your participation in
> the project.
> 
> [1] https://github.com/openssl/openssl/
> [2] https://github.com/openssl/openssl/issues
> [3] https://github.com/openssl/openssl/pulls
> 
> Kind regards,
> 
> -- 
> Tomáš Mráz, OpenSSL
>