Greets,
I've started hanging out in the #lucene IRC channel on irc.freenode.net, which
has apparently seen a significant uptick in activity of late. A debate has
arisen as to whether #lucene should be logged or not. Some participants are
in favor, while others are staunchly opposed.
http://markmail.org/message/l7ojm6r7qqyes5un
http://lucene.markmail.org/thread/et3jom4v3mt6k532
I'd like a logged channel, myself, but it doesn't have to be #lucene.
How about #lucy_dev?
The fact that a lot has been going on in #lucene is somewhat controversial.
Some people have begun to feel like they are missing important developments
unless they follow #lucene constantly.
Official Apache policy is that no decisions can be made in off-the-record
forums -- IRC, phone, private email, face-to-face conversations at ApacheCon
or elsewhere, etc. -- everything must be decided either on-list or within the
issue tracker. Of course it's permissible to discuss things off-the-record
(what are they going to do, forbid phone calls?) but decisions are supposed to
be made in a plain view of all community members in all time zones.
With #lucene, what people generally do is brainstorm on IRC, then summarize
the discussion on-list. This is imperfect because you can't go back to the
source and see how the debate progressed and because not all summaries are
complete or accurate, but it's not really any worse than any other
off-the-record discussion.
Logged IRC is actually better than all the other non-official channels in that
it is at least possible for sufficiently motivated people to go back and
review what took place.
I'd like to add logged IRC to our kit because I prefer it for brainstorming.
It takes me a lot of time to compose emails, and in general I think that's
time well spent. But for marathon ping-pong matches like the recent "Baby
steps" thread or <https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/LUCENE-1458>, I don't
think the time that went into those has made them any more comprehensible,
either to people reading along at the time or to people examining the archives
now. If anything, I think we would have brought more people along had we used
IRC because the informal nature of the medium makes it easier for someone to
pop in with a "wait, what?"
I'm proposing #lucy_dev as opposed to #lucy because my preference is to shunt
user questions to email. If someone else were to start #lucy that would be
fine with me, but that's a separate issue.
Want to discuss? I'll be in #lucy_dev off and on throughout today. It's not
logged yet, but here's a preview of what the logging would look like:
http://colabti.org/irclogger/irclogger_log/irclogger?date=2010-03-16#l2
Marvin Humphrey
