On Tue, Mar 17, 2009 at 3:24 PM, Bert Freudenberg <bert at freudenbergs.de> wrote:
> My point actually was not the new list, I just used that discussion to
> illustrate the issue I see.
>
> The question is if we could somehow support the (potentially large) group of
> developers who just want to "use Squeak". There are many more Smalltalk
> developers using Squeak than those who subscribe to the mailing lists. Be it
> developers in a shop or students in a class, they have no intrinsic interest
> in "advancing Squeak", at least not until they master it.
>
> I actually have no proposal about what to do, I just feel there is something
> missing. Sorry for the noise ...

This runs the risk of quickly turning into another flame war over the
number of lists, the relative merits of lists vs. forums, etc., etc.
but I think Bert raises a valid issue here. I personally know several
people who dabble in development using Squeak but have no interest
whatsoever in its ongoing development (other than that it continue to
work). There has been an assumption in the Squeak community that users
== contributors, which will most likely become increasingly incorrect
as(suming) the community grows.

As Bert says, the issue is not necessarily specific to a mailing list
but a question of how resources are presented to different audiences.

Taking the Seaside mailing lists as an example just because I'm
familiar with the numbers, there are on the order of 1000 users on the
seaside list and only around 70 on the development list. The problems
we discuss on the development list are just not of interest to the
majority of Seaside users.

Julian