Hi,
AFAICS the time has come to give flashrom its own mailing list (maybe flashrom@coreboot.org) and IRC channel (irc.freenode.net/#flashrom).
I do realize this has been brought up in the past, but while I was sceptical back then, I realized that the times have changed in the last few months. The release of flashrom 0.9.0 has increased both visiblity and user base, resulting in a sizable portion of list and chat traffic to be related to flashrom.
Some of us are only interested in coreboot, while others are only interested in flashrom. Since filtering mails according to subject can introduce lots of errors, having two separate lists would make watching one one of flashrom/coreboot easier.
List traffic over the last few years: 2007: 29 mails/day 2008: 41 mails/day 2009: 36 mails/day
Although the list traffic has not yet reached linux-kernel levels, it is already too much to read in full. I hope splitting the lists will allow people to concentrate on their personal area of interest and also encourage more reviews. After all, if you have to read less mails, you can respond to more of them.
One issue to solve is how we want to handle flashrom success/failure reports sent to flashrom@coreboot.org. Right now they end up on an unmoderated private list. After the change, they'd get a message that the list is moderated. This might discourage users, so we have to think of a nice moderation message, possibly mentioning that emergency help for broken flash is available on IRC.
The suggested way forward is outlined below: 1. Register #flashrom on irc.freenode.net (done) 2. Invite parties interested in flashrom to join #flashrom besides #coreboot. 3. Pre-Announce the mailing list split with the following text: "coreboot@coreboot.org will be split in two lists. flashrom@coreboot.org is where flashrom development and usage will be discussed. coreboot@coreboot.org will carry all traffic not related to flashrom. coreboot@coreboot.org list members will be subscribed automatically to flashrom@coreboot.org. If you are only interested in either coreboot or flashrom, feel free to unsubscribe from either list once the split is done." 4. Wait a week for protests etc. 5. Create a new mailing list flashrom@coreboot.org with the same subscribers as coreboot@coreboot.org. 6. Announce the mailing list split with the following text: "coreboot@coreboot.org has been split in two lists. flashrom@coreboot.org is where flashrom development and usage are discussed from now own. coreboot@coreboot.org carries all traffic not related to flashrom. coreboot@coreboot.org list members have been subscribed automatically to flashrom@coreboot.org. If you are only interested in either coreboot or flashrom, feel free to unsubscribe from either list."
Thoughts? Flames?
Regards, Carl-Daniel