Think of this as a motion as one might move at a meeting. Discussion and refinement are in order.
I don't understand the current rationale for a single CentOS users' list; probably in times past it was sensible, but I think the time has come for splitting the list by release.
I'm speaking from my own perspective, but I'm sure others have similar stories. How many users use all CentOS releases?
I am not on the Fedora users' list because of the volume of email, though I do use Fedora Core and might usefully contribute to FC in that way.
Similarly, I'm no longer on the OpenSUSE list, same story.
The time has come when I must, again, reduce the volume of email I see, because it's clogging my modem.
I use CentOS4 and plan to use CentOS5. I am interested in email for those, but not for CentOS 3 (I have no systems) nor CentOS 2 (I have one RHL 7.3 system that thinks it's CentOS 2, but it's in maintenance mode, and anything I do I will do alone).
I don't know how much email I would eliminate by dropping email for Centos < C4, but when I move to CentOS 5 I will lose interest in C4 and then there will be savings.
If this list were split into one for each release, then subscribers could choose which email they see. At present, it's all or none, and neither suits me.
If this list is split into four, then I expect the transition method would be to subscribe everyone on this list to the new four.
At some point, this would become read-only (nobody posts), or maybe all mail for this goes (via a filter to fix the headers) to all the others.
By "fix the headers" I mean "do whatever it takes to ensure replies go to the list the subscriber is replying to."
I'm sure this transition arrangement is imperfect; my objectives are to encourage CentOS to have the separate lists, and to ensure that the transition is fairly easy for users so we don't lose lots of subscribers.
What do others think?