[Buildroot] About user support and the mailing list

[Thomas De Schampheleire]

Hi,

On Tue, Oct 15, 2013 at 10:25 AM, Thomas Petazzoni
<thomas.petazzoni at free-electrons.com> wrote:
> Dear Peter Korsgaard,
>
> On Mon, 14 Oct 2013 21:59:12 +0200, Peter Korsgaard wrote:
>
>>  Thomas> Signed-off-by: Thomas Petazzoni <thomas.petazzoni at free-electrons.com>
>>  Thomas> Reported-by: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/19311747/buildroot-cant-use-local-site-method-for-custom-host-packages
>>
>> Heh, odd place to report such issues. Committed, thanks.
>
> 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'.

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.

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.

Other possibilities are a forum (don't really like it) and IRC (we
have it already). Others?

Best regards,
Thomas