MailingListsGuidelines.md

The Melange community uses some mailing lists as the primary method of communication. Our goal is to use these mailing lists to support the development of the SoC framework and Melange web applications, and to assist the organizations and users that rely on that framework to participate in programs such as Google Summer of Code TM. Our guidelines for using these mailing lists have been written with this goal in mind. Like the other guidelines related to participating in the Melange project, the Melange contributors, in cooperation with the community at large, will update these guidelines as needed.

We encourage participation on these mailing lists, but we also ask that participants treat each other with mutual respect and remember that the ultimate goal is to promote the development and use of open source and free software.

These mailing lists are hosted on Google Groups and share some common access settings.

“Project owners” of the SoC project hosted on Google Code are, by default (unless they decline), made owners of all Google Groups used by the Melange project. Similarly, “project members” are, by default (again, unless they decline), made managers of both of these Google Groups.

Group content (mailing list archives and discussions) can be viewed by the public at large on all of Melange lists. To help prevent list spam, only actual group members can post to the mailing lists and discussions. To prevent email spam, only owners and managers can view the corresponding Google Groups membership lists.

Due to lack of revision control in Google Groups, the Google Code wiki is preferred for all documentation, and svn for files (usually, but not necessarily, source code). The Pages and Files sections of the Google Groups used by the Melange project have been disabled and will not be used.

General discussion list

The primary mailing list used by the Melange project is the melange-soc discussion mailing list.

To post to the mailing list, membership is required, but normal group membership (with the limitations described above) is not restricted and is open to anyone. To sign up, visit http://groups.google.com/group/melange-soc

Developer list

The mailing list used for development discussions (such as code reviews) is the melange-soc-dev developer mailing list.

Please keep in mind that this list is intended for current and potential contributors to the Melange project, not for reporting issues or making feature requests. (Issues can be reported and new features requested using the issue tracker on Google Code). Participation on this developer mailing list (and in the IRC channel) is the “gateway” to earning commit access in the SoC project hosted on Google Code.

Issues list

The mailing list used by the soc@googlecode.com account on Google Code when comments are made in the issue tracker and on wiki pages is the melange-soc-issues issues mailing list.

This list should probably be treated mostly as an “announcement” list, since any discussion carried on using the mailing list, instead of in the issue tracker or wiki comments systems, will not be recorded back on Google Code. This leaves someone reading the issue or wiki comments via Google Code web interface with an incomplete picture. That being said, the community will use this mailing list whichever way works best, and people can always venture over to the melange-soc-issues Google Group to see what they are missing.

Please use the Melange project issue tracker on Google Code to report new issues or make feature requests, instead of the mailing lists.

Commits list

The mailing list used for SVN commit messages sent out by the soc@googlecode.com account on Google Code is the melange-soc-commits svn commits mailing list.

Please consider forwarding any replies you might have to a commit message to the original melange-soc-dev developer mailing list instead of this list, so that discussions can take place there, in front of a wider audience. This mailing list exists by request, merely to make filtering and sorting of svn commit noise easier.

Please use the Melange project issue tracker on Google Code to report issues or make feature requests, instead of the mailing lists.

Build list

The mailing list used for discussing passing and failing tests and other build health issues is the melange-soc-build build health mailing list.

Abuse

List owners and managers reserve the right to decide what constitutes abuse on the Google Groups mailing lists used by the Melange project. While spirited debate is encouraged in order to stimulate creativity and produce web applications of which we can all be proud, list participants are expected to respect the fellow list participants and the Melange community guidelines.