Hi Andreas,

You seem to have made up your mind and I won't try to change it. Just a
few comments:

Andreas Huggel wrote:
> you'll get an email sent to your registered address for each
> "watched" event.

I have not seen the practical implementation, so I can not comment. Done
properly such a gateway would be a significant step forward.


> What I haven't seen is an option to subscribe to some
> sort of digests.

honestly, digests are a marginal feature to me and I never understood
the advantage of receiving a digest?


> Brad, our sysadm, is not keen to maintain a patched version of Redmine.

perfectly understandable.


> The main advantages that I see from using the Redmine forum(s)
> * Users need only account to access all project information through a
> common interface

I see this from your perspective: a single-sign-on to all of exiv2
resources. From my perspective it would be one sign-on for each
project/list I am following. With mailing lists it is true singe-sign-on
everywhere, for both reading and writing.

Web based forums make writing difficult, resulting in less user
contributions, not more. Indeed, one of the world's most famous
management consulting firms recommend companies replace mailing lists
with forums to reduce the support work: when users post less, there is
less work to do.


> * Easy cross linking between issues and forum posts and repository commits

an URL in the commit can link to anything.


> * Today most discussions take place in the Yahoo group and I
> frequently end up copying a post to the bug tracker (bug/feature) and
> once it's there, the discussion usually stops. With the new setup, I
> hope it will be easier for people to post to the appropriate channel
> right away and we can discuss it there.

Why copy the post? why not simply enter the URL? with redmine you won't
read it offline anyway, and the bug trackers are all online tools too.

Ideal would be a bug tracker that synchronize it's database locally,
similarly to git or mercurial for version control; and if it could keep
track of the reference headers in the emails and use them to access the
text itself via the mail client, that would be the cherry on the cake.

Discussion tend to happen more often on mailing lists than on web based
tools, whether bug tracker or other. And normal users are quite scared
of the structured and complex environment of a bug tracker.


> * Last but not least, the data in Redmine in our control, not Yahoo's
> (or Google's)

If control is an issue, just subscribe an extra email address to the
Yahoo or Google mailing list, and pull it automatically somewhere into a
Maildir. I don't see a case speaking for controlling the list. On the
other hand the upside of having the list hosted for free by Y or G is a
strong case. And very easy to administer too. But that's my opinion.


> It has always been possible to post to the Yahoo group anonymously,

I am testing this now. WHen I log on the web to
http://uk.groups.yahoo.com/group/exiv2/ it says that posting is for
members only. Probably what you mean is that any email address can send
a mail to the group's email address?

Anyway, I wish you luck with Redmine and web based forum. Unlikely that
I will join / participate, but I am just a small and insignificant drop
amongst your user base.

Yuv