[sdwalker/sdwalker.github.io] 2bdb42: This week's update

[Jeffery To]

Hi Sergey,

On Fri, May 13, 2022 at 8:00 AM Sergey Ryazanov <ryazanov.s.a at gmail.com> wrote:
> May I ask why these notifications are directed to the mailing list
> that is dedicated for development talks? Such a notification just
> _looks_ irrelevant to some thread, it is not even a patchwork
> notification or a buildbot warning that is sent as a reply to a patch.

Maybe it would help to explain what uscan does:
https://sdwalker.github.io/uscan/

It scans for updates to all packages in the main repo and other feeds,
and sends (individual) email notifications to package maintainers when
their package has an update and/or any CVE vulnerabilities. I'm sure
many maintainers (including myself) rely on these notifications to
know when to update their packages.

The weekly update email could be more informative, but uscan is a very
useful piece of infrastructure that I (and suspect some others) want
to know is functioning correctly.

> It is a matter of balance. Everyone is happy to read these
> notifications, but someone will not need them and will create an
> automatic filtering rule. Or someone found these notifications useful,
> but everyone else wonders why they received them.

In the years that I have been subscribed to this list, this is the
first time I have replied to any email about these notifications. I
would suspect that most people are not bothered by them, or have
filtered them out and moved on.

As a point of comparison, I am subscribed here so that I don't miss
any development discussions but I have a filter to automatically
archive all patches (which is the bulk of the mail). The mailing list
isn't perfect and no one is going to be 100% happy with it.

> Is it possible to reconfigure these notifications to send them
> directly to your mailbox? Or maybe set up a dedicated mailing list? We
> already have the mailing list for commit notifications. I am
> subscribed and quite happy to be informed of development progress this
> way - it saves me a lot of time and does not bother people who prefer
> some other monitoring approach.

As I said, I think the majority of subscribers are not bothered by
these notifications; it is one email per week. I am open to being
wrong about this. I don't mind subscribing to another mailing list for
these notifications.

There could be dozens of commits per day; it makes sense to have a
separate mailing list for commit notifications.

Thanks,
Jeff