launchpad-dev team mailing list archive

[Jonathan Lange <jml@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hey Martin,

I don't normally like sending detailed, fisking "me too" messages, but
I strongly agree with particular points here.

On Thu, Oct 7, 2010 at 3:22 AM, Martin Pool <mbp@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
...
> I'm glad we're doing a retrospective on this, but we shouldn't
> overlook the positives: we've reenabled a useful feature, we have
> communicated to our users about an upcoming change rather than
> surprising them, and although the delivery caused a bit of excess
> email it could have been a lot worse.

+1

> I still think it's true that the majority of Launchpad users don't
> read the blog or the mailing list, so if we do have to tell them about
> something, we have to either send mail or have a way to give them a
> notification through the web UI.  We have to build up the muscles to
> do notifications well, and look for ways to avoid changes that need
> them to be warned.

+1

If you wanted to, you could put this under a broader theme of
automating and smoothing out operational tasks. In some ways, out mass
mail is not much different from running a write query on live. In a
project as big & long-running as this one, few things are "once off".

I know that you, Martin, are keen for web-based notifications. Me too.

> Beyond the actions Deryck lists, perhaps we should have a guiding
> principle that for changes like this we'll ramp it slowly rather than
> sending it to everyone at once, perhaps guided by a feature scope that
> selects.  Better to send 20 mails to 1% of users and have them
> complain, then stop the script...

+1

I think it'll take all of us a while to start thinking this way, but
it's worth starting now.

cheers,
jml