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One to rule them all: OpenStack projects unify mailing lists

Here’s what you need to know to get started with the new list.

December 10, 2018
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This time, it’s not about invisibility. In an effort to increase participation and surface the most relevant conversations and contributions, The OpenStack project mailing lists have merged. That means that the  openstack, openstack-dev, openstack-sigs and openstack-operators mailing lists have been replaced by a new openstack-discuss at lists.openstack.org mailing list.

If you were signed up to the previous lists, you’ll still need to join this one. (The reason: part netiquette, part legal.) The new list is open to all discussions or questions about use, operation or future development of OpenStack.  If you’re unsure about how to tag your topic to make sure your voice is heard, check out the most recent archive of posts and the tagging guidelines here.

What’s behind the effort to combine the lists?

“For one, the above list behavior change to address DMARC/DKIM issues is a good reason to want a new list; making those changes to any of the existing lists is already likely to be disruptive anyway as subscribers may be relying on the subject mangling for purposes of filtering list traffic,” writes Jeremy Stanley, infrastructure engineer for the OSF.  “We have many suspected defunct subscribers who are not bouncing…so this is a good opportunity to clean up the subscriber list and reduce the overall amount of email unnecessarily sent by the server.”

There’s another reason behind the mailing lists coming together, writes Chris Dent. “The hope is to break down some of the artificial and arbitrary boundaries between developers, users, operators, deployers and other ‘stakeholders’ in the community. We need and want to blur the boundaries. Everyone should be using, everyone can be developing.”

Dent, a member of the Technical Committee, longtime contributor and prolific chronicler of the OpenStack community, offers up a few helpful reminders about how to make mailing lists work better.

“You’re trying to make the archive readable for the people who come later. It’s the same as code: you’re not trying to make it maintainable by you. It’s not about you. It’s about other people. Who aren’t there right now.”

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