Hi,
While I'm not as closely involved in the Debian loong64 port as some
others do (I primarily work upstream, and Gentoo when I'm packaging;
after all I'm primarily a Gentoo dev), I personally agree that creation
of a debian-loongarch mailing list will help communication in many ways.
The Linux/LoongArch mailing list (loonga...@lists.linux.dev) currently
has 44 subscribers, as can be checked on the lists.linux.dev site, and
IMO it's only because talking there requires one to speak English;
similar user and/or dev groups on WeChat easily reach hundreds of
members. I expect a similar number of interested parties would subscribe
here after the list is created.
Which brings my next question: do we want to allow Chinese in this list
(people can be asked to write bilingual mails and translate/clarify if
necessary), or do we want to create a parallel debian-loongarch-zh list
for that?
Per the Debian mailing list CoC [1], the language to use is English
unless explicitly allowed otherwise. But I fear that if people are
forced to speak English, a majority of them would simply go away and
create an equivalent WeChat group and just continue there. In order for
the list to serve as the new go-to venue for coordination and
communication around the port, and not get ignored, I think allowing at
least bilingual mails (when the author is not confident enough that
their English expression wouldn't create confusion / misunderstanding)
is necessary.
As a matter of fact, even most contributors to this port do the above;
FWIW, they mostly only appear on official Debian services (bugs, wiki,
irc) because other DDs have to be involved, and all other coordination
happen in a WeChat group (that I also got invited into, so I know). IMO
creation of such an open list *should* mean substantially decreasing
private discussions like this, and we probably want to facilitate that,
so people don't have to first go learn technical English for a half year
before starting to participate and contribute, and valuable discussions
don't get permanently buried in someone's private chat history.
[1]: https://www.debian.org/MailingLists/#codeofconduct
