The future of our mailing lists

[Sébastien Villemot]

Hi,

As you know, the mailing lists on Alioth are going to be shutdown (i.e. no more
incoming mail) on 2018-02-01, i.e. very soon.

The team currently has two lists:

 * pkg-common-lisp-devel at lists.alioth.d.o, which is used:
   - as a discussion list for coordinating the development effort
   - for receiving bug reports, DAK messages,…
   - as the value of the Maintainer field (which plays the role of a
     "team identifier", used by some web services to list all the team
     packages, such as the QA page, the Debian Maintainer Dashboard, the
     BTS page for the team…)
   - as a contact point for users

 * pkg-common-lisp-commit at lists.alioth.d.o, which is used for git commit
   notifications

The -commit list is superseded by the GitLab email notifications at Salsa
(which in a typical setup will forward notifications to tracker.debian.org,
where users can subscribe to those notifications).

For the -devel list, there are several options.

One option is to do nothing, because a team of DDs has apparently decided to
take over the maintenance of such lists:

 https://wiki.debian.org/Alioth/MailingListContinuation

This is however not my preferred solution for several reasons: the
infrastructure is not yet ready, it will not run on official Debian servers
maintained by DSA, and it is only temporary (1-2 release cycles).

The alternative, relying on official infrastructure, could be either:

 * to ask for a list at lists.debian.org (for example
   "debian-common-lisp at lists.debian.org"). The procedure for asking for such a
   list is there (I am willing to do it):

   https://www.debian.org/MailingLists/HOWTO_start_list

   Note that there is no 100% guarantee that we are eligible for such a list,
   nor that it can be used in the Maintainer field.

 * or to use a team on tracker.debian.org. I have already created that team:

   https://tracker.debian.org/teams/common-lisp-team/

   (I am the only owner at the moment, because there is no way with the current
   infrastructure to have several owners for teams at tracker.d.o)

   The problem is that there is currently no mail alias for teams at
   tracker.d.o, but Raphaël Hertzog seems to be working on this:

   https://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2018/01/msg00141.html

Note that the two solutions could also be mixed: using a list at lists.d.o for
discussion purposes, and the new tracker team as the value for the Maintainer
field.

Please tell me what you think, since there are several options. The difficulty
is that, until the dust has settled, there is still some uncertainty about the
different options, so it’s hard to make a decision (but at the same time we are
under time pressure).

My inclination would be to ask for an official list
(debian-common-lisp at lists.debian.org), and see where it goes.

Best,

-- 
⢀⣴⠾⠻⢶⣦⠀  Sébastien Villemot
⣾⠁⢠⠒⠀⣿⡁  Debian Developer
⢿⡄⠘⠷⠚⠋⠀  http://sebastien.villemot.name
⠈⠳⣄⠀⠀⠀⠀  http://www.debian.org
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