The page at Community lists julia-news as a “low traffic mailing list for important announcements, such as new releases.” However, julia-news has not seen an announcement since the release of julia 0.5. (Previous discussion here.)
At a minimum, I think julia-news should be responsibly retired. This would mean
- moving it down to the list of archived mailing lists at Community and adding text about how one might subscribe to updates otherwise
- a final post to julia-news which announces it end-of-life, preferably with instructions for how one can continue to receive announcements. (Note that the text at Community says “Announcements will be made on the relevant lists if and when they are moved,” so visitors to that page even today may think julia-news is the place to go for announcements.)
On the other hand, I expect there is a significant “long tail” of users who are not regularly on discourse and for whom RSS is not in their regular workflow, but yet are still interested in important announcements in the julia community. It would be a shame for these folks to be unable to receive these announcements. Note that by definition these people are unlikely to speak up in this thread :-).
I think for this reason it would be best for the list to continue. Even if the postings are extremely brief (“[headline]; see discourse [url] for details”), this will still make it easy for many relevant parties to keep up with julia news. (To reference another community, this is what nearly all posts to django-announce look like these days, in fact.)