On Thu, Apr 20, 2023 at 05:20:37PM -0400, Matthew Miller wrote: > We’re missing people > -------------------- > > A Mastodon post from long-time Fedora contributor Major Hayden got me > thinking: > > > How do people make so much time available for mailing list > > discourse? > > > > Once I ensure my team has the technical guidance they need > > and I work through the tasks of work that I owe other > > people, I take a look at the mailing list and say: "Oh my > > gosh, what the heck happened here?" Then the discussion > > goes further off the rails while I'm typing out a reply and > > my reply is no longer relevant. > > > > — https://tootchute.com/@major/109666036733834421 > > I know many Fedora folks, old-school and new, for whom devel list is > just too much. I think that applies to the vast majority of people on my team. They are doing work that ends up in Fedora, they use Fedora, and they will sometimes needs to make changes in Fedora packages, but they'll rarely / never read the mailing lists. Essentially, unless a very large amount of your daily work is Fedora oriented, the devel list is not feasible to follow. It is not suited to infrequent/sporadic Fedora contributors. Myself I'll try to keep an eye out for interesting $SUBJECTs and read those, or peek into exploding threads to see what the fuss is about, but the rest I'll just ignore as it is too much. I'll try to relay the important nuggets of info to others in my team, but that's a limited mitigation. When you say "We're missing people" there's actually another factor that you've not mentioned....spam, or more specifically anti-spam countermeasures. There are a handful of very regular Fedora contributors, for whom about 50% of messages they send get reliably classified as spam by my employer's mail service because of something it dislikes about their mail server/domain's reputation. While I can allow-list their addrs for myself, each subscriber has to repeat the same allow-listing and I expect many won't bother. IOW, we have people who think they are contributing to Fedora discussions, but in fact their mails are getting effectively silently discarded. This is bad if we want inclusive discussions. In other mailing lists where I am the admin I get to see even worse problems where mails get unconditionally discarded at time of delivery due to disagreements between mail servers about the correct way to implement DMARC and DKIM. As a result certain senders are entirely prevented from collaborating via the mailing list in the worst possible way. They successfull send the mail, it is accepted by the list server, added to the online archives, but when the list server delivers to subscribers the message bounces back. Unless the mailing list admin watches non-delivery bounces no one will know this is happening. Certain senders will simply not be part of the discussions. Having battled email/spam problems wrt mailing lists for years now, I can only conclude that email is not viable as a reliable & inclusive communications tool in the modern world. > We’re scattered in actual practice > ---------------------------------- > Many groups have actually moved away from lists to using tickets for > team conversations — both those non-engineering functions > and development. Design Team has a mailing list, but mostly for > announcements: the work happens in tickets. Workstation largely uses > their Pagure tracker. And CoreOS conversations happen almost entirely > in tickets on Github. > > Tickets are made for tracking specific, actionable tasks, and that kind > of tracking is part of why teams use them over mailing lists — but > Fedora teams use them for open development conversations too. I think > that’s largely a symptom of mailing lists not being enough for what we > need. The trackers have media support, editing for typos or updates, > reactions for simple agreement, tagging people, and granular > subscriptions. They are effectively “off-label use” mini-forums that > teams can quietly move to using without the sort of conversation I > expect this message to generate. > Airplane diagram, survivorship bias > ----------------------------------- > > The set of remaining regular participants on this list is naturally > biased towards those for whom it is working just fine. But, core Fedora > development discussion can’t be limited to that ever-shrinking group. > Consider who isn’t here. The problems are real, and the trend isn’t in > a good direction. Or stockholm syndrome. As a long term email users I'm familiar with it and learn to put up with all its flaws and figured out ways to mitigate the limitations of email. If you speak to any long term email users in high traffic OSS communities you'll find many of them have created very elaborate mail filters, scripts and tools to create workflows for handling the high volume of their inbox. Newer contributors won't have this, so when you ask them to turn on the fire hose by subscribing to Fedora devel it is natural they will be reluctant. > Concrete proposal > ----------------- > > I’m not suggesting we shut down devel list next week. And I think we’ll > have some mailing lists for quite a long time. But, I think it’s time > to start moving some specific things, with the eventual goal of closing > every mailing list we can. > > > First, I’d like to move the Changes discussion. They will still be > posted to devel-announce, but responses directed to Project Discussion > in a new #changes tag. Ben tells me that this is a FESCo decision, > which seems reasonable. Early you mentioned that lots of teams have moved discussions into tickets in Pagure/GitHub/etc. I think that is an entirely natural thing to do for task oriented discussions. I think that Change proposals are precisely that - a task oriented discussion, and thus would naturally fit into issue tracker model. You then have the associated tools for tracking, tagging the changes, linking between related tickets, and more, all in one place. The way we use wiki categories to tag Change proposal pages, and then have to have discussions somewhere else entirely, is effectively reinventing a poor-mans' issue tracker. Just use a real issue tracker here and stop splitting the process around multiple tools. > Next steps > ---------- > > I know this is a big change. I’ve been thinking of writing this message > for a long time. I’d really like to convince everyone that it’s the > right thing — or at least, an acceptable one. I don't disagree, and as you illustrate we would not be going into uncharted territory here. Many big OSS projects have gone the same way for similar reasons. Fedora is about innovation, being on the cutting edge, etc, and I think that includes being willing to adapt to changes in the way we work as a community too, not be left behind using obsolete processes and tools that are increasingly abandoned by the rest of the OSS community. This doesn't mean we're saying all aspects of email are bad. There are many things to like about email, and reducing/eliminating its use will certainly make some things worse. Your proposal is effectivey saying that when considered in aggregate, switching to newer tools like discourse and/or issue trackers (as appropriate for the particular scenario) will still be a net win, despite some of the downsides. Much as people invaribly hate change, they are also very adaptable. Having seen these kind of transitions before, my experiance is that the downsides never turn out to be as bad as imagined because once people get past the grief & anger about the change, they ultimately figure out alternative ways to work effectively in many cases. With regards, Daniel -- |: https://berrange.com -o- https://www.flickr.com/photos/dberrange :| |: https://libvirt.org -o- https://fstop138.berrange.com :| |: https://entangle-photo.org -o- https://www.instagram.com/dberrange :| _______________________________________________ devel mailing list -- devel@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx To unsubscribe send an email to devel-leave@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx Fedora Code of Conduct: https://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/project/code-of-conduct/ List Guidelines: https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Mailing_list_guidelines List Archives: https://lists.fedoraproject.org/archives/list/devel@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx Do not reply to spam, report it: https://pagure.io/fedora-infrastructure/new_issue
