There is an unwritten rule in the Apache community: "What doesn't happen on the mailing list doesn't happen". Today, this blog will talk to you about why there are such rules.
Since the members of the community are all over the world, the time difference is a very important problem that everyone needs to solve in the process of communication. Most of the developers in the Apache community live in Europe and the United States. Indeed, if you want everyone to sit down for a meeting, the basic time is when the developers in the Eastern Hemisphere are sleeping. For example, the twice-yearly Apache member meeting is basically selected in It was held around 3:00 am Beijing time. The time zone problem can be better resolved through the mailing list, because the mail is asynchronous, and the receiver can choose his more convenient time to reply to the message.
Of course, another advantage of using the mailing list is that the mail archives and retrieval are more convenient, so that friends who care about the subject of the mail can jump in and participate in the discussion at any time. I often see people in Camel's user group follow up on a problem that was discussed months ago looking for a better solution. Community members can obtain the discussion context of relevant issues in a timely manner by searching the public archived emails. The mailing list can greatly reduce the cost of obtaining information for community members, which is very important for open source communities with relatively large personnel turnover.
Having said so much about the benefits of using mailing lists to communicate, why do Chinese people rarely use mailing lists to ask questions? A brief analysis may involve several issues.
The first is the language problem, because in the Apache community, everyone communicates in English. For most developers, if they want to solve problems faster, they often choose to use Baidu to search for relevant Chinese solutions. And rarely try to go to the mailing list to ask questions in English. For most problems related to user usage, searching in Chinese should be able to find relevant solutions. But if we want to delve into the details of the software, we can often get first-hand information in English.
The second possibility is that people think that the email will be slow. If the discussion parties of the email are distributed in the eastern and western hemispheres, an effective back-and-forth discussion may take up a day. Perhaps it is because of this slowness that we can carefully consider the logical relationship of the context, as well as the cognition and feelings of the relevant discussion people when writing emails, so that everyone's discussion can proceed more smoothly.
Now the domestic open source community is also developing very rapidly, and most people choose instant communication groups such as QQ or WeChat groups to communicate. The advantage of this kind of communication is that everyone can communicate anytime and anywhere. Since there is no relevant archive retrieval function for communication in such a timely communication tool, it is difficult for everyone's discussion to precipitate into effective information that can be used by subsequent members. Such superficial prosperity can hardly have the driving force for sustainable development.
Recently, in the Apache incubation project community, there has been such a discussion about the establishment of a Chinese QQ community. Interested students can obtain relevant content through the mailing list archives . Of course, because this topic involves many aspects, there will be more directions of discussion: whether Apache should encourage multilingual discussions, and whether mailing list discussions are necessary. From the perspective of making it easier for everyone to watch and fully understand the context of the problem in a timely manner, everyone should be able to appreciate the power of the mailing list.
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