[Buildroot] About user support and the mailing list

[Thomas Petazzoni <thomas.petazzoni@free-electrons.com>]

Dear Thomas De Schampheleire,

On Tue, 15 Oct 2013 15:04:44 +0200, Thomas De Schampheleire wrote:

> > Yes and no. Our mailing list is now having a *huge* traffic, mainly
> > developer-oriented (patches and related discussions). For the user just
> > starting up with Buildroot, not very familiar of open-source
> > communities, not feeling necessarily at ease with subscribing to a
> > 50-100 e-mails/day mailing list, searching other forms of support seems
> > natural to me.
> >
> > Maybe it's a sign that we should have a more "user-oriented" support
> > channel. A dedicated mailing list? An publicized usage of Stack
> > Overflow or some other similar stuff? Not sure exactly about this, but
> > might be worth a chat at the next Buildroot meeting, I believe.
> 
> The amount of traffic on the mailing list has indeed increased a lot.
> On a previous Buildroot meeting, we talked about a split of the
> mailing lists. At that time, we decided not to do this (yet).
> 
> One of the advantages of a unified list is that new users also are
> 'exposed' to development, and are hopefully more likely to contribute
> too. There is no 'development elite' in this model.
> At the same time, a unified list also encourages developers to help
> users. It's not possible to subscribe to 'only the developer list'.

Agreed.

> A split mailing list model is mainly advantageous for users that only
> want to subscribe to a low-volume list, but other than that I don't
> yet see big advantages. If you have more, please let me know.

That's mainly what I was concerned about. Subscribing to a 50-100
mails/day mailing list might be problematic for people who just want to
use Buildroot, even though I agree that the boundary between "users"
and "developers" is a lot less cut in Buildroot than it is for other
software.

> Thomas: you seem to be active on StackOverflow. Can you give some more
> background how this would work for us? I've only used stackoverflow in
> a read-only mode, when googling a specific question.

I'm not so much active on stackoverflow actually. In fact I just
subscribed to the tag "buildroot" so that whenever a Buildroot related
question is asked, I receive an e-mail. I generally find Stack Overflow
a bit better than web forums thanks to the scoring system which ensures
"good" answers are the one getting the highest visibility. Stack
Overflow also generally has a very high Google rank, so whenever you
search something programming-related on Google, there's a high chance
of having a hit on Stack Overflow.

In this discussion, I don't really have one good solution to suggest,
I'm merely interested in discussing the fact that the mailing list
traffic has increased, which on one side is really great (the project
is active) but on the other side may be problematic for users who just
want to have a little bit of support.

Best regards,

Thomas
-- 
Thomas Petazzoni, CTO, Free Electrons
Embedded Linux, Kernel and Android engineering
http://free-electrons.com