The decision to move to a forum was announced a while ago, and it hasn’t
appeared yet. I think we will be making the move soon and I wanted to provide
some reasons why it was delayed and what comes next.
The reasons it was delayed are twofold:
- When we (the community) decided to move to a forum there was plenty of other
planned infrastructure work that was in the works that took immediate priority
(such as the source compatibility suite and supporting Swift 4 development).
- In August (when Swift 4 was wrapping up) my team at Apple seriously picked up
the topic of the forum again and started looking in how to make it happen. At
that point, a bunch of unexpected delays, one after the other, happened. I
can’t share these details (they are mostly non-technical) and going through
them would come off as me making a bunch of excuses anyway. I do realize the
forum has been promised and not yet delivered for some time, and I know how
frustrating that is to the community.
Here’s what happens next:
- We plan on having the company behind Discourse.org <http://discourse.org/>
host the forums. We’re wrapping up the remaining steps to issue a PO, but my
hope is to get that all done within the next couple weeks. Thanksgiving in the
USA may delay that to the beginning of December.
- My understanding is the forum will still have a swift.org <http://swift.org/>
address, so the hosting is just an implementation detail.
- The company hosting Discourse.org will migrate the existing mailing list
archives over to the new forum. One thing we will need to figure out (possibly
as a community?) are specific requirements we have in place for that migration.
The new forums don’t have to exactly mirror how the mailing lists are
structured today, and part of the reason to move to the forum was motivated by
having new opportunities to structure conversations.
I suspect there will be some trial and error with moving over the existing
mailing lists to the new forum, and I don’t have a good feel on how long that
will take. However, once we reach that stage, it should be very transparent to
the community what exactly is going on. My hope is that process will start in
December.
Ted
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