Hello, On Sat 11 Apr 2020 at 11:11PM +02, Enrico Zini wrote:
> The recent difficult discussion on SSO here on -project made me think of > a use case for which Discourse might be just the thing: Debian > Enhancement Proposals[0]. > > I get the impression that having proposals discussed/peer reviewed on > Discourse might be easier and more pleasant than on lists. For example, > it would give a way to express agreement with something more visible > than silence, it would give a way to get visible feedback other than > negative, and give some measure of perceived relevance to the various > contributions made to the discussion. One concern I'd like to raise posterity. It is not clear to me that discussions on a platform like Discourse can be sufficiently well archived. For any technical topic (including DEPs) it is important that we can find old discussions in the future, easily, and without there being too many entrypoints into the search. Right now I can rely on my notmuch database to pull basically any Debian discussion, because it includes the BTS, lists, and mail which I was CCed on or received through an alias like ftpmaster@. And one can easily incorporate mboxes from master.d.o or bugs.d.o to get any missing context.[1] Perhaps Discourse's e-mail integration would be sufficient for me to be able to search my personal archive for the content of past discussions, but it would be very difficult for others not present for the discussion to incorporate the text of everyone's messages into their information stores. You'd have to use your browser's File->Save Page As or similar, which is difficult to search later. > I'm not sure if I would be motivated right now, or ever, to have another > round of "peer review" like the one I just had, on a list. Discourse > seems like it might be a venue for peer review that wouldn't make me > feel like leaving the project after a couple of days of interaction. Yes. I would like us to be able to handle this communicative function better. Could you say more about how you think Discourse would have changed how the discussion went? I am concerned that the problem is basically a social one, and so cannot be solved just by using a different software stack to host discussions. [1] E.g. `M-x notmuch-slurp-this-debbug` in the elpa-mailscripts package. -- Sean Whitton
signature.asc
Description: PGP signature
