OpenSSL project is considering to close this mailing list

[Dr. Matthias St. Pierre]

Reading through the replies it seems obvious that the response is an unanimous "No, please don't do it!!"

I completely agree with the majority: Even with a shitty email client from Redmond which sucks at displaying threads
properly it is still more convenient to read the daily feed while drinking the morning coffee than to
browse half a dozen websites in order to be informed. And subscribing to the email notifications for the
repository is not a satisfying replacement for normal users who are not interested in development details.

The searchability is not a general argument against mailing lists, if you have a good searchable mail archive.
The OpenSSL MTA web interface  [1] is rather spartan, but there are good alternatives (e.g. [2] and [3]).

> as the focus of the OpenSSL users and developers community is now on
> the OpenSSL project GitHub page...

This is true for the developers but not for the user community. The mailing list has a much larger
audience. And our users are *very* helpful in answering questions of other users. This is a great help
and relief for the core team and should not be underestimated.

>  We would like to move to using Issues  and Pull
> requests in GitHub to discuss topics and ask questions related to
> using and developing  OpenSSL in a single location

Having two different locations for seeking answers and asking questions is an inconvenience, but there
is an alternative solution for the problem, which is practiced by other projects:

Make a strict separation between GitHub issues and mailing lists (or chat groups): the former are
intended for bug reports and discussions related to the development process, while the latter are 
intended for user questions about the artifacts of the project.

In the Scapy project for example, the issue template [4] sends people to a chat forum (Gitter) when they
have questions. Questions asked via GitHub issues are strictly ignored and closed.


Matthias


[1] https://mta.openssl.org/pipermail/openssl-users/
[2] https://www.mail-archive.com/search?l=openssl-users%40openssl.org&q=DRBG
[3] https://marc.info/?l=openssl-users&w=2&r=1&s=DRBG&q=b
[4] https://github.com/secdev/scapy/issues/new/choose





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