On 4/21/23 23:20, Florian Weimer wrote:
* Matthew Miller:
Big threads are … bad, actually
-------------------------------
When we have something to talk about, it tends to explode into a big
thread. The thing in January with FESCo’s frame pointers decision
(https://lists.fedoraproject.org/archives/list/devel@lists.fedoraproject.org/thread/RNJZUX3ZI34DIX6E4PVDKYQWCOFDQ4UY/#RNJZUX3ZI34DIX6E4PVDKYQWCOFDQ4UY)
is a good example of things going badly.
Most of the conversation was under the subject “Schedule for Tuesday's
FESCo Meeting (2023-01-03)”, because everything started as a reply to
that. That’s pretty easy to overlook. It’s possible for replies to
change the subject when replying, but that can’t be done
retroactively, and then isn’t consistent (and it breaks threading in
Gmail, too).
Then, things got rather hostile, making it hard to have a reasonable
conversation about the issues (both technical and procedural). And
then, things went in circles without adding anything new.
This could have all gone a lot better.
You brought up fairly concrete examples, but I don't see how the
platform matters in those cases. Someone would need to shut down or
delete (parts of) conversations more or less arbitrarily, even if they
are not actively harmful as such, simply because they create too much
work for others to follow.
Surely that's not something you are willing to do?
For lists that are active, the split is confusing — when should
something be on the packaging list rather than devel? What happens when
something is related to both Cloud and Server, or Workstation and KDE?
One can post to both lists, but if someone replies and isn’t subscribed
to both, the conversation gets split.
Do Fedora mailing lists reject mail from non-members, and redirect
follow-ups?
If they do that, that's the first thing you could fix. Then such
discussions no longer would get split.
Not just Fedora
---------------
There’s a big trend towards Discourse in open source projects overall.
Python and Gnome have both migrated entirely from their mailing lists.
Ansible is working on it. Plus, there’s Rust, Kubernetes, Nextcloud,
Flathub, Grafana, Home Assistant, KDE, and I’m sure many others.
All these instances are isolated. It's not possible to cross-post.
This makes cross-project collaboration increasingly difficult because
instead of Cc:ing another list, perhaps with a summary of the discussion
so far, you have to create a completely new topic somewhere else, and
then someone has to copy over summaries manually.
(If I recall correctly, that currently doesn't work well with Fedora
lists because they reject posts from non-members.)
Personally, I have accounts on many, many Discourse instances, but I
don't think there is a single one I read somewhat regularly. I find the
mailing list mode and the notifications rather unpredictable. Maybe an
alternative client could help (nndiscourse?), but as far as I understand
it, there's no real API, so that's kind of hard?
I could find an API docs, and I could retreive posts.json from our
Fedora instance
https://docs.discourse.org/
So the question is, what is a "real API" that you would consider OK?
For a post, there is create, update, delete, retrieve and even list the
latest.
IMHO that's as CRUD as one can be :D.
So, there is even a REST API? At least retrieval can go unauthenticated...
Regards,
jarek
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