[development] Proposal: Move all dev support off this list to new StackExchange site

[jeff at ayendesigns.com]

Well, I was really without an opinion one way or the other until I read 
this. For my part, I have certainly asked a number of questions here, 
primarily because they are heavy lifting questions and I found most of 
the helpful souls in #drupal-support to be more of the site-building 
types than bitheads, and when I first crossed paths with this list it 
was apparently already 'polluted,' so I came away thinking this was what 
it was for. And also, I freely admit that I found a lot of pleasure in 
reading opinions on the best way to accomplish things FROM people like 
Angie, Earl, Randy, Dave, Larry and the other heavy hitters. In a world 
where, despite best intentions, the architecture is not necessarily 
intuitive, the handbook often falls short (yes, I need to help out 
there) and the demand on us as developers leaves less and less time 
available to spend 2-3 hours hunting and reading to empower 5 minutes of 
coding, it was one of the few places I've had a warm and fuzzy feeling. 
All of that, though, was simply my ignorance as to what this list is 
supposed to be. So, all of that said, I think those who established it 
and used it while it was still being what was intended ought to make the 
decision. I'm quite happy to seek assistance wherever a place exists, 
and, now that I know, excited to think that there can again be a place, 
here or wherever you all decide, for me to eavesdrop on the types of 
discussions that used to occur here.


Jeff


On 03/17/2011 10:58 PM, Angela Byron wrote:

>
> Well, that's essentially what this list has become, and why most of 
> the people who used to frequent the list back in 2005-2007 no longer do.
>
> It used to be that this list was for high-level strategical 
> discussions around core/contrib/d.o development, active brainstorming 
> on big problem solving, important announcements that affected CVS (now 
> Git) account holders, and those sort of things. What we currently 
> (badly) use "meta" issues and a variety of fragmented groups on g.d.o 
> for, was what this development list was for at one time. Support 
> questions were directed to the forums or to IRC.
>
> However, over time, the volume of support requests coming into this 
> list for "Is there a module that does what I want?" and "How come my 
> code is broken?" have far out-stripped most of the veterans' ability 
> to ask, repeatedly, for them to be taken off-list. And so most of them 
> have by now vacated the premises in favour of lower-traffic IRC 
> channels like #drupal-contribute or to groups.drupal.org 
> <http://groups.drupal.org> silos. These mediums have now mostly taken 
> over the core function the mailing list used to, but in an ad-hoc, 
> "you only know about it if you happened to be there or if some kind 
> soul wrote a summary in the issue queue about it" fashion. This 
> "support creep" has been happening in lots of other places too over 
> the past couple of years: #drupal, issue queues, etc. and it all only 
> exacerbates the problem of the more dedicated and hard working 
> individuals withdrawing away from the larger community in an attempt 
> to maintain some sort of sanity. All of which is *extremely* 
> detrimental to our community, including the people who need support.
>
> I believe Randy's proposal is an attempt to rectify this situation, 
> and get this mailing list back to its roots, by providing an alternate 
> mechanism for both support and important announcements. I don't agree 
> that shuffling contributors off of Drupal.org <http://Drupal.org> is 
> the answer (I have a long-winded, ranty blog post about this I need to 
> write up sometime...), but I also frankly don't believe that this list 
> will ever overcome the stigma/reputation that's grown up around it 
> among the core group of contributors, even if we were all to do a 
> concerted effort to get the content back under quality control. It's 
> easier to just give up and call a spade a spade (or, in this case, a 
> development support list a development support list). :(
>
>
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