I've spoken with Kevin Bourrillion of the Google Java Collections and Guava projects. He's recently announced that Stack Overflow should be used as one of the support mechanisms. From his mailing list post:
Where-to-post summary:
- How do I? -- StackOverflow!
- I got this error, why? -- StackOverflow!
- I got this error and I'm sure it's a bug -- file an issue!
- I have an idea/request -- file an issue!
- Why do you? -- the mailing list!
- When will you? -- the mailing list!
- You suck and I hate you -- contact us privately at [email protected]!
- You're awesome -- aw shucks!
That sounds like exactly the right balance to me. Topics requiring "deep" knowledge and discussion are likely to be best on a specialist list - whereas questions which "dabblers" can answer easily would do well on SO.
It's one thing for SO to be a user-to-user forum so that fellow developers can help solve problems, but I don't think it's really appropriate for reporting bugs and making feature requests for technology vendors (whether open source contributors or companies) to reply to.
I think it's fine for SO to be one of the encouraged ways that users help to solve each other's problems, but I wouldn't want it to be the primary support forum for a technology (insofar as reporting bugs, defects, feature requests, etc.).
