HI Scott,


On Sun, Jul 6, 2014 at 6:48 PM, Scott Calvin <scalvin@sarahlawrence.edu> wrote:
Hi all,

This is probably as good a time as any to mention a miscommunication I've seen come up a couple of times on the list that may have caused unnecessary friction. It's a good time because it =isn't= what transpired in the current thread (which ended happily for all involved), so it hopefully won't get bogged down in particulars.

Sometimes I've seen someone post to the list that they've been having an intermittent, difficult to diagnose, or otherwise mysterious problem, asking if anyone else had seen something similar. That makes for a lousy bug report, but is, in my opinion, a reasonable and rational use of a list like this.

As a hypothetical, something like "is the latest distributed version of Hephaestus working for other people using MacPorts?" is a useful diagnostic question, and a terrible bug report. It does not require a response of any kind from Bruce, Matt, etc., and they should not feel compelled to give one. "Works for me" or "No, Hephaestus crashes" would be useful responses from other members of the community.

To put it another way, I think this list straddles the boundary between being part of the reporting system for software and a community board. It's important to recognize, I think, when each function is being utilized.

That's not to say that there aren't lousy bug reports that get posted here--there are. When someone says "Athena crashes every time I open it--please fix this bug," they are not being useful to anyone. But I am saying that not every report of problems is actually a bug report.

That said, I think this is a good list. Everyone who contributes to it is a volunteer, and there are interesting and helpful discussions that take place at a wide range of levels.


Mailing lists have the great advantage of being universally available, and of having an understood and relatively slow pace.   That is, it always acceptable to wait a full day before responding to any other message, no exceptions.   A corollary is that people familiar with such mailing lists should understand that it is NOT chatting, and that questions should be *posed* as opposed to carelessly thrown together.

Of course, there will be vague and poorly-worded questions.    There are better forums for actual bug reports, but lots of questions here are almost-but-not-quite-bug-reports.   I think these should be fine on the mailing list.   It's also completely OK to respond with "well I can't possibly answer your question without more details".   Endlessly harping on people to "ask good questions" seems (empirically) to not be very fruitful. 

For me, I think the main issue is that the process is extremely asymmetric.   If only Bruce (or me, or Sam, or only some one person) can answer broad categories of questions, that is inherently unfair.   There are many questions asked on this list that that can be (and often are) answered by many people, say, general XAFS  questions or about analysis strategies.   These may get contentious, but not because of an inherent asymmetry.

I think the best solution is to work on removing the asymmetry.  It is just not sustainable for hundreds of people to rely on a large software base that is only developed and maintained by an individual.    It is not only unfair to expect it,  it is also a really bad strategy that you are taking -- "I know, I'll just rely on my research results on this software written by this one person".  It's actually kind of insane.  

I don't know of an easy solution to this.    Bruce and I have each asked for help many times, and both of us have re-designed software specifically to make it easier to have people contribute.   The response has been poor.  I won't speak for Bruce, but you have to understand that I view the problem as entirely yours, not mine.   Why has this asymmetry persisted so long? 

P.S. If we're looking for ways to improve the list in the future, I'd suggest considering the possibility of a more modern forum format. I am sure there are open-source platforms for such a thing. It would be wonderful to have an upvote type feature (Facebook's "like" is the most familiar example), more user-friendly threading, and the ability to delete and edit posts.

I'm familiar StackExchange -- is something like that what you have in mind?    I could be persuaded that such a thing could be useful.   Perhaps Kevin would find such a forum less offensive, which would be nice.  

This seems like a great way for someone to contribute.

--Matt