Castor Mailing Lists

This list is a read-only low volume (less than 1 message per week) mailing list for special announcements related to Castor, such as new releases.

Archives:

This list is a moderate volume (between 10 and 25 messages a day) mailing list for the users of Castor. It should be used to discuss general questions related to the use of Castor, problems you are having getting Castor to work, and so on.

Archives:

This list is a moderate volume (possibly fewer than 15 messages a day) mailing list for developers working on or wanting to work on Castor itself (not developers merely working with Castor), for code patches to Castor to be posted (please use diff -u format), and for general Castor questions.

Note this is NOT for general Castor questions like "Why isn't Castor working for me?" Please ask those sorts of questions on the user mailing list (after reading the FAQ first, of course).

This list will be used by the main committers to discuss the following items:

Please subscribe to this mailing list, as we believe that feedback from the user community on many of these issues is essential for the progress of the project.

Archives:

This read-only list sends out notification messages detailing any change made to the Subversion (SVN) repository where all the source code and libraries are stored for development purposes. The average user probably doesn't need to subscribe to this list.

Archives:

Please use above mailing lists for what they are intended for. Please use the descriptions above to target your message to the correct mailing list.

By all means, please avoid cross-posting messages to both lists, as it will decrease the quality of service we would like to offer.

Having said that, there might be a valid case for cross-posting a message (e.g. us confirming that a problem is a result of a bug, and hence referring you to 'dev' for further discussions), but in general the use of this should be restricted as much as possible.

As we believe that an effective interaction with the user community is essential for Castor to progress as a project, we have decided to establish a slightly more structured approach in dealing with many of the issues we and you encounter.

Especially on (but not necessarily restricted to) 'dev', we will be much more interactive about many of the issues mentioned above. As such, we have decided to structure our messages more thoroughly, and have come up with the following set of acronyms to show our intention:

Please prefix your messages to all mailing list with either [XML] or [JDO]. This will help us to improve the time it takes us to react to your needs. Having said that, all committers will monitor both areas.

The following are some general "common-sense" guidelines for using the mailing lists:

Most people are already following these guidelines. To those people, we thank you. For those of you who are not ... please read carefully.

1. Please be kind and respectful to your fellow castor users.
2. Please refrain from using words and phrases like URGENT, IMPORTANT, MY WIFE WILL LEAVE ME IF YOU DO NOT RESPOND, etc, in the subject line of your postings. Or even in the body of the message for that matter.
   You may think that things which are URGENT or IMPORTANT to you are just as urgent and important to everyone else reading this list. You'd be surprised at just how wrong an assumption like that can be.
3. Please use meaningful subject lines. "Newbie Question", is not meaningful what-so-ever.
4. Please provide necessary information, where applicable. Statements like, "I receive a NullPointerException when using Castor, what's up with that?", are not very helpful, add unnecessary traffic on the list, and will probably never get an answer.
5. As a follow-on to #3, when submitting examples please try to submit the smallest possible example which demonstrates the problem. Short examples are easier to follow and will get much quicker responses from developers or other users than long examples with lots of extraneous code/data. Remember, we're not being paid to do this.
6. Please read the documentation before posting. It doesn't take long and it will save us valuable time from having to answer questions that are already covered in the docs.
7. Please check the mail archives before posting. Many questions on this list have already been answered before.
8. Please refrain from posting confidential information. Once an e-mail is sent to the list, it goes out to all subscribers, including archive engines. We cannot remove or delete messages sent to the list. Once sent they are available for the public to see. If you are unsure about what is confidential or not, check with your manager, supervisor, or the person in charge at your company.
9. If you are going on vacation. Please enjoy yourself. We really want you to have fun and get some much needed rest and relaxation. With that being said (and to be perfectly honest), none of us really want to receive your automated vacation responses. Please either add a filter to your vacation response so it doesn't get sent to the list or users posting to the list, or simply remove yourself from the list before you go, and add yourself back when you return.
10. Please refrain from sending emails to this mailing list formatted as text/html.
11. Please start a new thread per topic/question. That is to say, please avoid 'hijacking' existing threads.

As stated in the guildelines above (see #10), please refrain from sending email to these mailing lists formatted as 'text/html' under all circumstances.

Amongst other things, it complicates life for users not working on Windows and decreases usability of the mailing list archives, as it prevents text searches from returning useful results.

Additional information why we consider HTML emails to be avoided can be found here.