Communication tools that we use
Mailing lists
See below for descriptions of the Cocon mailing lists. A list of all available lists as well as links is available a the overview page.
When posting, please observe common-sense netiquette when posting. In particular:
- When replying, please edit the original message and include only enough to establish context, not the entire message.
- Don't crosspost to the user and developer lists. The developers also read the users list.
- Only reply to a message if you are really posting a reply on that thread; don't use your mailer's "Reply" function as a shortcut to get the list address into the "To:" field. Instead, use your mailer's "new message" function to start a fresh thread. When people abuse "Reply" and just change the "Subject:" line to a new topic, it makes it harder for threaded mailreaders to display the subjects accurately. This can make it less likely that your message will be seen and replied to.
- Please ask your questions on the list. If someone helps you out, don't email them off-list to ask your next question. You will get the best answers if you stay on-list, and that way the question and answers can also benefit the current and future community.
- When asking for help, don't forget to include:
- The version of Cocoon you are using (the most important thing to not forget! :-)
- The servlet container (e.g. Jetty, Tomcat etc.) you are using.
- Platform details: JDK version and host OS
- Any relevant sitemap configuration, XSLT, Java or Javascript source code you are working with
- If you're getting an exception thrown, include the stack trace
- Don't just say that something "doesn't work"; explain (a) exactly what you did; (b) what you expected to happen; and (c) what happened instead of what you expected. That type of explanation gives people a lot more information to work with.
- If you can show that you at least made some effort to figure something out, you will in turn get a more helpful response. In particular, if you have in mind some idea that might help and it is an easy thing to try, don't post to the list to ask "Can I....". Just try it for yourself and see! :-)
- A very common response to user questions is "What are you trying to accomplish"? Try to supply that information when you first ask the question, and you will get a definitive answer that much sooner. Cocoon is a rich framework that gives you a lot of tools, so that it's not always obvious to new users which tool set is the best to use for a particular problem. New users sometimes get wrapped around the axle on some detail of the solution they are trying to make for a given scenario, and then end up posting to the list to ask how to do some exotic or bizarre thing. If you can take a step back and describe the scenario itself, the more experienced users may be able to suggest one or more simpler solutions.
- If you ask for help with something, and then you later figure it out for yourself, please follow up on the list and describe what you did to fix the problem. We like to prepend "SOLVED: " to the Subject: line when doing this.
- If you feel you must say "Please reply to me off-list, since I'm not subscribed", you can certainly do that; you just may or may not get a helpful reply! You'll almost certainly get better results if you let people repond on-list. See the Gmane links below to learn how easy it is to read the Cocoon lists without subscribing your own email address.
Of course, new Cocoon releases are announced on this list.
Archive
All available archives are reported on the overview page.Note that the mail-archive site changed in July 2003.
- http://www.mail-archive.com/users@cocoon.apache.org/ (since July 2003)
- http://www.mail-archive.com/cocoon-users%40xml.apache.orgtwo (before July 2003)
The topic of this list is Cocoon development. If you post a question in the user list, and the discussion gets so geeky that it has to move to the dev list... don't forget to come back to the user list with a "SOLVED:" post, once you've gotten everything ironed out! :-)
The dev list gets automatic update notifications from the JIRA issue tracking system and from the Jenkins build system.
Archive
All available archives are reported on the overview page.Note that the mail-archive site changed in July 2003.
- http://www.mail-archive.com/dev@cocoon.apache.org/ (since July 2003)
- http://www.mail-archive.com/cocoon-dev%40xml.apache.orgtwo (before July 2003)