not sure what this is for and I'd rather not have more than one mailing list if we can prevent it. Did someone ask for it?

That would be me. A longstanding problem with Container Linux is that while we have discussion lists, an issue tracker, release notes, and a non-technical blog, we have no good way to push important technical news to all our users. Those venues (individually and in aggregate) don't cover our entire user base, and all of them are too noisy for us to recommend that the entire user base follow them in detail.

The idea is that there should be a low-volume venue we can strongly recommend all users subscribe to. Then, when there's breakage or an upcoming breaking change, we have a fast and reliable way to warn people about it. This is especially important for a "configure and forget" distro like CL or FCOS because users may not be paying as much attention to the usual distro discussion channels. We long intended to implement this for CL but never quite got to it; we probably would have used it ~10 times over the last 12 months if it had been available.

:thumbsup:

can we limit who can post stuff to it? or maybe we should just moderate everything

This is sounding like an announce list of some sort. It should be limited to who can post to it and be clear it is for announcements. Are lists like this called -status these days?

@sanja wanted "-status" because she says "-announce" seems like it's gonna be for marketing announcements or something. I don't have a particular opinion.

I take @sanja's point but I'm okay with either name. We should limit who can post, and maybe set Reply-To (I know, I know) to coreos@.

Please don't do "announce" for this kind of stuff that @bgilbert was talking about - it's more like a status Twitter account, except our user base will appreciate a mailing list for this more. They can subscribe to it and be sure it's not going to be "Oh, check out this awesome event we paid 50k for and you can subscribe to five more of our newsletters for free if you give us all your data. Also, download this ebook here."

I know we never intend to do that, but that's what "announce" feels like and if @bgilbert hadn't made such a compelling argument for a read-only extra list, I'd say one mailing list only. It feels unfair for people to have to subscribe to Discourse and have a Fedora account just to use Fedora CoreOS and get status updates, Twitter also can't be expected from people, but email everyone has to have, so it's the most common denominator for important status updates that could brick or are going to give a security update to your system.

Limit to who can post, coreos-status@.

No problem. I was worried that the community would not understand the purpose of -status because they were looking for -announce.. and then the list needs to be renamed -announce etc etc.

I'll note that in the fedora space at least announce lists don't have that connotation.
ie, we have an announce list ( https://lists.fedoraproject.org/archives/list/announce@lists.fedoraproject.org/ ) that gets things like outage announcements, new releases of Fedora, flock conference info, etc.
and a devel-announce list that has things like freeze dates, rebuilds, packaging guidelines changes, etc.

That said, I am happy to just make the list called coreos-status and have now done so.
I made sanja, bgilbert and mattdm owners and set it to now moderate any posts.

Please let us know if you need anything further.

:e-mail:

Thanks, @kevin and @smooge.