Hi Sergio, On Tue, Feb 17 2026, Sergio Pastor Pérez wrote: > Could you elaborate further on what would committing to Zulip mean for > you? Remove the mailing lists and IRC and centralize all communications > through Zulip?
Yeah, I think committing to Zulip would mean saying "we communicate on Zulip - if you want to be a part of the Guix community, join here". No official mailing lists, no official IRC. There could be some overlap (as there has been with debbugs and Codeberg), but with the explicit stated goal of moving to Zulip-only communication. > If you are thinking something like that, I'm afraid that it would be > unlikely to reach a consensus, at least not until Zulip has proven to be > the ideal tool for us. Certainly I think consensus would be hard to achieve, but we have a mechanism for doing so (a GCD). If we can't build consensus, then we shouldn't do it. As I understand it, the Matrix room(s?), XMPP room(s?), and whatever else are unofficial. It's not a problem for them to exist, but in terms of official project communication it's just the mailing lists and IRC. Adding an unofficial Zulip community would not require consensus (although calling it "Guix" seems inappropriate in that case), but then bridging to the mailing lists and IRC is a more fraught proposal. > So I can only imagine something like that happening in a natural way, > where just by preference people gravitate towards Zulip for most > communications. I don't think consensus on that would be possible if > done artificially through discussions. I disagree, and I'm not convinced this is a good way to do things. This is actually arguing for "we should intentionally make our communications more fragmented", because now it's not enough to be on the mailing lists and IRC, you also have to be on Zulip! It might be possible to bridge things so you can only be on Zulip, but my scepticism remains (I'll respond to your other email after this one). Even if it is possible to bridge things, that would effectively demoting the mailing lists and IRC to "secondary" communication channels, because things posted directly to Zulip channels/topics wouldn't go anywhere. Changing the way the project communicates is a big deal. I don't think relying on it happening organically is realistic, or fair to the people who are invested in the current processes. The reason we have a GCD process is to work through peoples' concerns, not steamroll them with "everyone likes this more, so you have to deal with it". > Do you perhaps have a different proposal? My proposal is: write a GCD, and build consensus for your idea. This will involve using Zulip yourself and getting experience with it, solving the technical problems that you run into, as well as listening to everyone's concerns and working hard to convince them. Carlo
