Hi, Not sure how many remember this, but until a few years ago, there used to be a Web interface to LilyPond lists on a site called “Nabble”, enabling users to interact with lists without the usual mailing list “workflow”, which is unfamiliar to many people these days.
(If you find it hard to believe that one may have trouble using a mailing list, pipe this into machine translation: https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/lilypond-user-fr/2023-06/msg00173.html .) At some point, Nabble was shut down, leading to much dismay, especially from French-speaking users on lilypond-user-fr (where I believe it was used more frequently than on lilypond-user). At the time, I did much research on Web interface bridges to mailing lists, leading to https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/lilypond-devel/2021-08/msg00006.html but my tests stumbled on technical problems (I don't recall what exactly) and I eventually gave up. Lately, I've been somewhat worried by the recurring distribution delays, as well as several French users who told me they didn't receive lilypond-user-fr emails at all anymore (I've never been able to identify why). So I revived this effort, by investigating Discourse, which is now used by a lot of larger free/open source projects (e.g., GNOME, KDE, Fedora, Python, Rust, ...) and more or less a standard. Unlike the previous time, this doesn't allow bridging between the website and a mailing list -- the mailing list has to be migrated entirely (it remains possible to use the site by email exclusively, but not on an @gnu.org address). See https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/lilypond-user-fr/2023-10/msg00038.html (in French) for the current state. Essentially, I've set up a self-managed Discourse instance and managed to migrate the lilypond-user-fr archives to it. Now we're discussing whether we should actually migrate. (We haven't done it yet, but I felt bad staying silent about this proposal on -devel.) (And if you're wondering why I went from being very skeptical about Discourse to doing all that work, it's because at first I thought archives couldn't be migrated.) One reason I'm writing this email is to clarify that I'm **not** proposing to migrate any lists other than lilypond-user-fr in the **near** future. Historically, the lilypond-user-fr community has been independent from other lists. I think it's fine for it to make its own decisions, and it doesn't necessarily need to have the same discussion channels as the user and devel lists. (FWIW, the German folks have a SimpleMachines forum at https://lilypondforum.de .) The reasons I only proposed a migration for lilypond-user-fr so far are that a) there was more demand on lilypond-user-fr b) lilypond-user is a much bigger list c) the lilypond-user-fr archives are essentially unusable (because you can't search for terms with non-ASCII chars, which is a PITA for French) Now, **if** lilypond-user-fr actually migrates **and** after a few months, no major problems occurred, we **may** want to start considering whether we'd like to move other lists. The answer may well be no. Cheers, Jean
signature.asc
Description: This is a digitally signed message part
