Re: Fedora should replace mailing lists with Discourse

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On Fri, Oct 19, 2018 at 9:16 AM Gerald B. Cox <gbcox@xxxxxx> wrote:
>
> Again, I believe some are trying to do an apples to apples comparison with Discourse and mailing list technologies.  Discourse was build from the ground up with the goal of fostering communication and collaboration.  Hyperkitty is a bolt on HTML to mailing list archives.  It's good for what it is, but it isn't Discourse - and usage numbers tend to bear that out.
>

That's an unfair characterization. HyperKitty was designed from the
ground up with that goal in mind too. The _sole_ difference is the
backend approach. Discourse uses a database system while HyperKitty
uses a mail list engine.

You know why the usage numbers bear that out? Because the upgrade to
HyperKitty was mishandled and delayed over and over. We were screwed
over by the fact that our infrastructure doesn't run on Fedora, so
that made it harder to get it working. The initial deployment was very
slow and unoptimized. Bugs in the UI remained unfixed in Fedora's
installation even though upstream fixed them. I would not be surprised
if upstream ignores us because we don't seem to be upgrading.

The development process for HyperKitty basically stalled out because
migrations were impossible from Mailman 2 to Mailman 3 for a *very*
long time. Fedora somehow did it, and that seemed to have not gone
back upstream, so until *very recently*, upstream did not recommend
doing mm2 to mm3 upgrades.

That *completely* handicapped adoption of HyperKitty, because
HyperKitty requires Mailman 3. What's worse, because it's almost
impossible to run on RHEL due to the lack of Python 3 (which continues
to anger and frustrate me), Red Hat never migrated their mailing
lists. Red Hat's lists are one of the larger installations, and it was
a real blow to not have that migrate.

The irony that I can probably get SUSE to deploy Mailman 3 and
HyperKitty before Red Hat will is not lost on me.

> The fact is that email usage is declining.  People are moving away from it and prefer to use other platforms for collaboration.  As with many things... when something new comes out, there are a group of people who push back and want things to stay as they are - history has proven time and time again, that change is inevitable.  If something new is the better solution, as people become aware of it and use it - it will become the go to solution.  The examples are endless and span multiple disciplines.
>

You know what? I bounce back and forth between HyperKitty and my email
client. If all the lists I subscribed to used HyperKitty, I wouldn't
be using my email client at all. While I don't generally reply from
HK, it's mainly because of bugs that I know are fixed in newer
versions.

We have not taken good care of our mail list infrastructure. I don't
blame our infra team. I blame the fact our infra runs on RHEL, and
RHEL has handicapped us in so many ways because of their own choices.
Fedora can't control its own (infrastructure) destiny because we have
no power to influence RHEL at all. And that's broken.

> Fedora has a long history of supporting new and innovative solutions and toolsets.  That is what helps differentiate us as a distribution.  We need a tool that will encourage more participation.  I believe Discourse will help with this - people will discover new and more efficient ways to do their work and the sun will rise the next day.
>

And yet, for 15 years, Fedora didn't have a web forum for user
support. People have asked for it over the years, and Fedora refused.
That's why things like FedoraForum.org exist instead of being part of
Fedora itself.

I'm a guy who started with web forums who later used email lists, not
the other way around. I vastly prefer forum-style environments. I
still don't like Discourse for this kind of stuff, because it's just
not designed for handling contextual conversations.

And there are problems with Discourse too: doing partial quoting with
attribution is annoying and requires editing the quote to restore that
information. In addition, searching for posts and topics becomes
exponentially slower as the system handles more content, which is a
huge problem if you're trying to find information to cross reference.

It's also bad for archiving, since threads are inherently unstable.
Conversation splitting and merging is very awkward (as I've observed
in the Snapcraft Discourse). I can keep going, but it doesn't matter,
because you're dead set on this anyway.


-- 
真実はいつも一つ!/ Always, there's only one truth!
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