Perhaps adopting a convention for the subject line, like "Usage question:
xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx"? We're still a small list, so it wouldn't be horribly
cumbersome. If the list grew beyond 150 or
so<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunbar%27s_number>active users, or if
the signal:noise ratio grew too low, perhaps then that
would be a good time to readdress the issue.

I confess that I haven't had to deal with such things before, so I'm not
familiar with the practices that may work in other groups faced with a
similar issue.

On Wed, Mar 5, 2008 at 7:41 PM, Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com> wrote:

>
> Johannes Schindelin <Johannes.Schindelin@gmx.de> writes:
>
> > On Thu, 6 Mar 2008, Tilman Schmidt wrote:
> >
> >> would it be possible to have separate mailing lists for usage topics
> and
> >> for discussions of ongoing development? I imagine that might help those
> >> who just want to use git (like me) to find their way around.
> >
> > AFAIAC you can have your "users-only" mailing list.  Personally, I will
> > never look at it, though, since all I am interested in is the
> development
> > of Git.  If that holds true for the majority of Git _developers_, it
> might
> > even be a bad idea to have a separate users' list, since then
> >
> > - no ideas from strictly-users would flow to the developers, and
> >
> > - new developments would not reach you, and
> >
> > - you would not get help by the people knowing the internals _deeply_.
>
> Personally, I suspect I would end up subscribing to both, but
> two mailing lists would make it much more cumbersome than
> necessary to correlate the original user "itch" request that
> triggered an enhancement, the discussion that clarified the
> design constraints and requirements, and the patch and the
> review comments that lead to the final implementation,
> especially if you do not encourage cross posting to both lists.
> And of course cross posting will make user-only list more
> technical which would defeat the original point of having two
> lists.
>
> "users-only" list could probably created by readers' MUA, by
> picking emails that do not have "diff --git" in its body; that
> would probably be a good enough approximation for people who are
> not interested in the technical discussions.
>