Hi Yuv,

Thanks for your detailed reply.

> You seem to have made up your mind

The discussion is important. There is no point to switch if I'm the
only one who thinks its useful. If there is continued negative
feedback I'll have to reconsider.

>> 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.

Why don't you sign-on to Redmine and try out the various email
notification options. The mails are in plain text in the meantime.
Then, if the actual experience confirms your perception that this
setup doesn't fit your needs, just stop using it. In the worst case
you end up with an unused account for the Exiv2 bug tracking system.

>> 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.

Previously, an active Exiv2 contributor needed two accounts: one with
Yahoo and one for the Mantis bug tracker. That is down to one now and
it's essentially the same effort to report or comment on an issue as
it is to post to the forum.

> 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.

This doesn't apply to a small project like this in my opinion.
Feedback is important to know what users need and how to improve the
software, it is not desirable to curb it. In the case of Exiv2, we're
lucky, users tend to be developers or advanced users with experience
in how to communicate in this environment so there is not much "noise"
here.

>> * 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?

Or that. The point is that it needs to be copied more often than
necessary because the Yahoo group is all that people know and use. I'd
like to change this a bit, see above.

> with redmine you won't read it offline anyway

Why not? I'm getting an email for each forum post and each activity on
the issue tracker. There is no need to go to the web interface just to
check what's happening. Only to reply I go there, using the link in
the mail.

> 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.

Filling in the issue report form requires a minimal amount of extra
thought compared to posting to the forum. In fact, it may be too easy
now, we'll know if we see a raise in invalid or incomplete bug
reports...

> 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?

On the Support page on exiv2.org there used to be a valid username and
password with which users could post to the group. With the
announcement of Redmine I removed that, but you can still see the old
page here eg:
http://web.archive.org/web/20071201164704/http://www.exiv2.org/support.html

> Anyway, I wish you luck with Redmine and web based forum. Unlikely that
> I will join / participate

Well, thanks. I hope you won't leave before you signed-on and tried it out.

BTW, did you notice the new -pp and -ep options in the exiv2 command
line tool to list and extract previews from RAW images? They were a
last-minute addition before the 0.18 release, done with your idea in
mind that you wanted to try this feature for use in Hugins.

Andreas