To counter this point: > But the present organisation looks defunct. There’s no strong leadership. A lack of central-ised leadership is a good thing If this is their only reason for calling the organisation defunct then this point is invalid however I am unsure if this is where the critique lies
In that spirit i am pondering how something akin to central leadership mandating such a change occur in this environment. The biggest concern I can think of about doing something like this and degrading existing workflows would be alienating developers who prefer the existing methods and perhaps had a hand in making them what they are currently. A lot of people in a company would likely grumble about such a mandate as a way of getting over it. I guess here some examples: - consensus could be tried for in a formal polling process and it be worked on post consensus - one could also do the work and propose it then to dispell any concerns of achievability but at the risk of it not being used - one could also try building an approach in which the project would gradually fade into a state where both options are viable, and then perhaps, should consensus be reached then, the project could fade into a state with solely the changed tooling example stages: - current tooling - git repo-s mirrored, chat channel-s bridged - facilitate project interaction on new git hosting method ( issues, mr-s, ...) - fade towards solely using the consensus desired tooling I think consensus is more suitable to large decisions than voting when maintenance of the group boundary ( guix devs) and maintenance of the number of states ( a set of tooling with only one tool per use case ( savannah or gitlab, matrix or irc, ...)) is desired an issue like this could cause a split and sometimes that is ok but when that is undesirable, if the one resulting state is formed then a continuous discussion process to form this one state into something which has the least cummulative "friction" is desirable. whilst this may be slower initially than a top down mandate, those adapting to a top down mandate would have to adjust from what they are most comfortable causing slow down in the future page 154 of this document presents a diagramatic representaion of a consensus process: https://www.radicalroutes.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/woocommerce_uploads/2022/10/How2WorkersCo-op2019A5Lo-Res-pslouz.pdf In defence of meta discussion, i think meta discussion is really just discussion where an assumed component is brought back into discussion. I am new to the project as well, in my experience I have found the mailing lists to be quite fun, i havent submitted any patches to guix yet so i can not comment on that perhaps an alternative could be mailing list propaganda to garner the excitement that currently surrounds something like discord one trend i have seen with guix is the tendency to use existing technology with extensions to achieve ones means instead of using/ developing a technology which includes all desired features as standard, maybe this is a function of the older style the irc and mailing lists are both publically logged and the system-s seem cohesive the logs on irc are harder to read than scrolling up in something like matrix, also the lack of non-text media can be tricky On Mon, 9 Oct 2023 at 11:29, Tao Hansen <worldofge...@riseup.net> wrote: > > Hello, I hope it's ok I'm replying to this email as a follow-up to > decreasing the cognitive overhead for new users. I'm also brand new to > the Guix community and ecosystem. I wanted to share a perspective from a > user on a Lemmy instance who wrote why the Guix ecosystem was not > friendly enough to meet them where they were, a person in their early > twenties. I'd like to suggest approach their criticism with compassion > and open-mindedness. > > @velox_vulnus writes at https://lemmy.ml/comment/4625080 > > > I don’t like the vibe of ageism against young people that is > > associated with GNU. What is also frustrating is their reluctance to > > improve their infrastructure. > > > This reason is kind of terrible, I admit, but they could choose to > > move over to Matrix over IRC, but they choose to be willingly open to > > spam over having a proper, documented chat channel. I am also > > reluctant to use my personal mail, for the mailing list. Matrix gives > > me that anonymity, without also having to geopardize on participation. > > NixOS is on Matrix, and that’s why I like it. I know Matrix isn’t > > perfect, but it the better choice between any other messenger. > > This user could use an email address dedicated to Guix discussion but > really I can only agree that sticking to IRC, which requires a lot of > effort to keep a history log and more effort to host a bouncer makes > contributing to synchronous discussions difficult. I, myself, am only > active on the community-run Matrix server and another, less free, > channel because the overhead is just too high. > > > They could choose to remove non-Libre JS from GitLab, Sourcehut or > > Gitea, or at least come with a new source hosting platform, but they > > choose not to. > > I also have a hard time with the insistence on the "Old Ways" as somehow > more pure, more legitimate than the new. There's some sense of the > expression, "You kids get off my lawn!" And the decentralized nature of > sending Git patches by email, which I still have not ventured to try, > makes it hard to *discover* Guix development in a single place. A user > needs to go to any one of the mailing lists, pull the Git repo or browse > Savannah or the issue frontend for bugs and new features they might be > interested in, and generally have an idea of what they want to be > looking for to find it. Discovery by serendipity is missing. > > When using the mailing list, even figuring out how to reply to the right > thread here in Gnus is trying and I'm not even sure if I've done it > right: people change the subject line, threads grow so large they become > unmanageable; I had to make sure I CC'd the whole list instead of just > reply to this mail's author. I still haven't figured out how to stick > guix-devel in my Gnus home screen: my starting view is always empty > and I have to remember the shortcut to get to the gigantic overview of > every Gmane list (this isn't a cry for help). > > There's more to their post: I encourage folks to check it out. > > We have the FOSS technology to tackle a lot of these critiques and bring > in a whole new wave of contributors. We have fully open Git forges and > modern messaging protocols to make a brand new developer-friendly Guix a > reality. > >