Hi, all

It seems counterproductive that Rafael Mesquita received three separate responses that started off pretty identically (even though they included unique and useful information). I'd like to offer the suggestion that, when responding to a project proposal sent to the ML, that the responder (1) acknowledge responses sent before his own, (2) try to avoid duplicating content of the prior responses, and (3) explicitly mention how his response differs from the ones before it. Consider it a kind of incremental diff, if you will.

The idea is just that the student should be able to read through all of the responses without having to figure out what is the same or different between emails. I imagine responses like
"I agree with what responder A mentioned. I'd like to add that..." or
"I mostly agree with what A and B mentioned, but also note that such-and-such is another area that could use functionality similar to what you proposed, and would be more pertinent to The Gimp's goals"

(To be explicitly clear, these examples were not meant to necessarily pertain to Rafael's proposal).

--xsdg

Sven Neumann wrote:

Hi,

This is unavoidable on a mailing-list. Not everyone receives the mails at the same time and there is no way you can know if anyone else has already responded to the mail.

I can see how that would be the case if the responses were temporally close to each other. However, the receipt times at bc2.EECS.Berkeley.EDU for Rafael's message and the three responses were: Rafael Mesquita: Tue, 18 Mar 2008 16:01:58 -0700 (PDT) Bill Skaggs: Tue, 18 Mar 2008 21:32:51 -0700 (PDT) Sven Neumann: Wed, 19 Mar 2008 00:19:23 -0700 (PDT) Ingo Luetkebohle: Wed, 19 Mar 2008 02:45:31 -0700 (PDT)

If you're saying you didn't get Bill's message before responding, then so be it (though I might offer that your email is sort of broken; ignore this quip if you choose to receive daily batches of gimp-developer mail). What I imagine happened, however, is that people read Rafael's message and responded immediately rather than first reading the responses that had already been sent, and only subsequently sending a response.

I realize that it's hard to both be lazy and read through an entire thread before responding, but I feel that we should at least be able to put forth the extra effort when trying to convince students to spend their time improving The Gimp rather than going to a more organized project.

And, seriously. If multiple hours of delay isn't enough time for at least the majority of respondents to get on the same page, then we should probably have one person acting as a liaison between the folks on gimp-developer and inquiring students.

--xsdg