bug#20389: A way to communicate announcements to developers

[Glenn Morris]

Package: emacs
Severity: wishlist
Version: 24.5

(Bug report to remind about
http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/emacs-devel/2014-12/msg00851.html)

Please create a mechanism to communicate important announcements
(feature freezes, etc) to emacs developers.
No-one should have to read (all of) emacs-devel, it's too noisy.
And the info-gnu-emacs list is not appropriate for this IMO.

FWIW, here's what I would do. It'd only take a few mins to set up:

1. Go to https://lists.gnu.org/mailman/admin/emacs-devel/topics

2. Enable topic filter.

3. Add topic name "emacs-announce"; regexp "emacs-announce"; description
"announcements all Emacs developers should read".
(Using just "announce" may lead to false positives?)

4. Document that developers should subscribe to emacs-devel and at
least subscribe to the "emacs-announce" topic. Whether or not they also
choose to "receive messages that do not match any topic filter" is up
to the individual.

5. Use "Keywords: emacs-announce" in the header of relevant mails.
Better (?) to use keywords: than the subject: header, to avoid all the
replies to said subject being sent out as announcements too. If you
forget to add it to a message, you or anyone else can just resend it.