Which Group for BeagleBone?

I'm really confused. I thought someone said to post Bone messages to
the Bone group and they would also show up here in the Beagle Board
group. Did I read that wrong?

Rick

I think so. I monitor both and respond to both but I only see the messages on each group and I don’t get dduplicate messages…

Gerald

So then shouldn't we post BeagleBone discussions to the BeagleBone
group? Otherwise we have to search both groups for discussions on a
topic.

I don't see these groups solely as a way to contact you, I see them as
a way to share information. The BeagleBone group should be the focus
for related info or it makes a lot more work for users to find it.

Rick

Just post everything to this group, that keeps down the fragmentation. A lot of bone emails are about the software, which is shared between the beagleboard and the beaglebone.

Then shouldn't the BeagleBone group be shut down? That's my point.
Right now it is confusing and counter productive. We should have one
group for both or separate groups for each, not two groups and post
willy-nilly.

Rick

That's what I keep saying, but the bone group is still there :frowning:

I'd personally rather not have all the non-beagle bone posts. I read every post to the bone group, I scan the topics of the board group and trash most of the posts as they are unrelated to the beagle bone that I've purchased.

I guess that begs the question, is there really much overlap with the
software. I know that the software is largely the same, but if you
have a software problem on a Bone, is it better to post that to the
general Beagle Board group or a special BeagleBone group?

Rick

The people doing the software are not subscribed to the beaglebone group, you do the math on that :slight_smile:

Let me say this. If you need Linux or SW help, the experts are on the main beagleboard group. I am on both.

Gerald

How do you know that? Maybe that is because currently it is not
"official".

Lets look at the posts to the general group and see how many Bone
software questions end up having a common element to the other
boards.

Rick

Four years of experience and the Beaglebone traffic I see on the main group. 4200 member vs. 116, is very high. Lot of SW efforts, GPIO. SPI, PWM. Linux works the same on all the BeagleBoards, depending on the version. It is just the lower stuff that is different.

If I had thought a second grouop was a good idea, I would have started one at the beginning.,You can learn a lot from people with issues on BeagleBoard and BeagleBoard-xM from a SW perspective, especially on things like Ubuntu and how to build images.

Gerald

I'm in charge of the sw and I'm not going to join that group, I know of other sw people who aren't going to join it either.

^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

A bit heavy handed, given that there is lots of software that
runs on those boards that is not Angstrom.

Koen was referring to what ships with the board.

Gerald

I only noticed the existence of this group today and this got me a bit puzzled about where should I look for information and post messages when needed.

In my opinion, we should keep it all in the beagleboard group and close this one, with all respect for the creator of beaglebone group.

Most software that runs on the bone also runs on the beagleboard. The difference lies mostly under the bonnet.
For those topics that are board specific, we may use tags, like prepending [bone|beaglebone] or [bb|beagleboard] or even [bb-xm|beagleboard-xm] to easilly filter through all the messages.

On on hand, having a separate group allows one to easilly filter information about our specific board model.
On the other hand splitting groups would impair sharing of experience and information and there’s a lot to be shared between both boards.

Cheers,
Tone.

It all seems that long serving contributors to Beagleboard have a
problem agreeing among themselves about this issue of one discussion
or two, which just leaves the rest of us confused.

From what I can see, as an idiot outsider, most of the messages on
both boards relate to hardware. So from where I sit splitting them
makes sense.

If I wanted to discuss Angstrom or other Linux issues which did not
relate to the hardware I would go to some discussion attached to the
Linux distribution.

Just my two pennyworth.

Bill

I agree with Tone that establishing a convention that has bone, xM or board (and maybe Angstrom, Ubuntu, etc.) as the first word in the subject line would be a good idea for postings about a specific board. Since postings automatically get [beagleboard] prepended, the resulting subject lines would be "Subject:[beagleboard] bone <question about>". This makes it easy to filter. As for the rest of this discussion, it's always been my belief that the people who do the work get to set the rules. Gerald, Koen, Jason, Robert, etal, have built the boards and made the distros available to everyone else. IMHO, so long as they want to continue, it's their tune to call.

wjr