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 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.