Hi Matthew, On Thu Apr 20, 2023 at 17:20 -0400, Matthew Miller wrote > As it is, devel list is too much for many people to follow — people > we’d like to have around. I disagree. I find mailing lists much easier to deal with. They're all in one place, they're synced between my devices, and I can use whatever client I like. I can start writing a message on my phone, save it as a draft, and send it from my laptop. I can filter messages to my heart's content. Everything is threaded and I can choose to ignore the threads I'm uninterested in. It's easy to skim the list and I can do so on my terms, as opposed to being pushed towards a _centralized_, single point of failure, javascript-heavy, bulky web frontend. I understand that Discourse has functionality for interacting via email, but that's fundamentally not its purpose, and it's apparent that email users are second class citizens. With mailing lists, most messages are sent as plain text email that displays properly in my TUI email client, and they're easy to quote and splice to reply to the parts in which I'm interested. I can both create new threads AND reply to existing ones. > It covers many different things at once, yet > also drives us towards more scattered communications. > Our infamous > mega-threads are not really effective for getting to community > consensus, and tend to bring out the worst in us. How is this inherent to email? IMO, this correlates two unrelated things. I don't think it's fair to blame people's poor interpersonal communication on email. > I know this is a big change, but, hear me out… I'll do my best, but I'll warn that I'm resistant change and am content with current mailing lists. If anything, I think we need to provide Fedora Infra more resources to properly maintain and keep up to date our Mailman instance. > 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 Again, I acknowledge this problem, but you've failed to demonstrate how this is inherent to mailing lists. > And… some people aren’t here because — in > contrast with our “Friends” foundation, it isn’t always a nice place to > be (and mailing lists don’t provide many tools for moderation, except > the big hammer of outright bans). Well, you can delete messages from the ML archives in the same way you can delete forum comments, but people who sign up for notifications will still receive a copy. > And that’s just one example. Take a look back at any mega-thread, and > you’ll find similar — and worse. When things get heated, the only way > to intervene is by adding more. There are often long subthreads of two > people going back and forth on tangents. Then, other conversation > branches duplicate that, or refer across. Classical email tools don’t > actually handle this kind of thing very well at all. In my experience, > it only really works if you keep up with the conversation in almost > real time, which has its own problems even when that’s possible. My email client has much better support for threading than Discourse does. I can easily toggle between threaded mode and flattened latest first mode. This is easier to navigate than Discourse's flat list. Email allows you to chose the best experience for you from a multitude of clients. > We’re scattered in actual practice > ---------------------------------- > > Devel list may be the center, but we have _hundreds_ of Fedora mailing > lists. A dozen or so are reasonably active (Test, Legal, ARM…) but most > are inactive or dead. Some are just meeting reminders over and over — > for meetings that aren’t even active anymore. It’s easy to make but > hard to _unmake_ a mailing list. Yeah, I think the mailing lists could use more organization and cleanup. > For lists that are active, the split is confusing — when should > something be on the packaging list rather than devel? What happens when > something is related to both Cloud and Server, or Workstation and KDE? > One can post to both lists, but if someone replies and isn’t subscribed > to both, the conversation gets split. Yeah, this can be confusing. I think the solution is organization and cleanup, not completely shutting down mailing lists. > With “devel” as the main list, conversations about marketing, design, > events, and so on don’t really have a central place. (The Mindshare > list never really caught on.) That makes these important activities > feel even more disconnected and secondary in status — and they > shouldn’t be. > 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. Gitlab being added to the mix definitely hasn't helped with the fragmentation. I think teams should be encouraged to standardize on tooling, but at the end of the day, teams will decide what works best for them. Freedom is one of the Four Foundations. > 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 having discussion split out from structured planning/ticket tracking is a good thing. The former is well suited for a mailing list or forum and the latter for issue trackers. > 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. Yes, those features are useful for some teams and are well suited for certain types of discussion, but I think the well established devel list has served us well and meets its purpose. > 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. What evidence shows that the group is ever shrinking? I often see Self Introduction posts and new people interacting with project. I suppose that whether they continue interacting afterwards is another question. > Devel List is too many different things! > ---------------------------------------- > > We use it for Change discussion (resulting in those > not-actually-so-great big threads). > > We use it for introductions and onboarding — we’re usually pretty good > at that, actually (but it adds to the overall load of following the > list). We’re not very consistent, though. > > We discuss packaging: guidelines, help on different topics, > coordination on specific work. There’s unclear overlap with the > packaging list, though, which is a bit confusing. Yeah, I wonder if it makes sense to sunset the packaging list in favor of devel. > We talk about higher-level Fedora OS development topics that don’t fit > anywhere else. For example, this on installer environment size: > https://lists.fedoraproject.org/archives/list/devel@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx/thread/75TIBSA2PT6YZJQ3YSDIMA3FWXHQI7YP/ > Sometimes, these are FESCo topics (which FESCo heroically struggles to > keep here rather than on Pagure tickets…). This became a problem for the incredibly controversial Frame Pointers change, but I'm not sure that's a general theme > Sometimes, people talk about a particular interest in the hopes of > forming a Special Interest Group. Often that does result in a new SIG > launching — sometimes with a brand-new mailing list which then ends up > getting only a few posts ( and a whole lot of spam years later). But > this really suffers from the survivorship problem: many people who > might be interested will never notice. > > We have release process announcements — mostly to devel-announce, but > then occasionally replies and discussion here. Blocker bugs and other > test-list and QA topics are cross-posted, as part of the release cycle. > > And then there are a lot of robo-messages: reports, reminders, etc. > These are really valuable to a few people, but add a lot more to wade > through for everyone else trying to keep up. > > There are certainly others, as well. > > In short… there probably shouldn’t just be one thing. But, the > cross-posting problem makes it hard to split up as a mailing list. I think the devel list makes sense as a catch all, general development discussion place. People are free to filter out the threads that aren't relevant to them. Specific tasks that develop out of those discussions can be delegated to the respective SIG/WG/committee task tracker. The unified devel list allows cross-SIG communication and high level planning that I think we'd miss with fractured forum categories. > Enter Discourse > --------------- > > If you’ve talked with me about anything related to any of this in the > past ten years, you probably already know that I like Discourse. It’s > good software made by cool people. And, it’s entirely open source, with > a SaaS business model but with real, usable releases. (No open core, no > “open source theoretically but good luck”.) I definitely appreciate that it's fully open source. This is more than I can say about other tools we're trying to move towards such as Gitlab. > And, we have it in production in Fedora already, at > https://discussion.fedoraproject.org, with categories for > announcements, user help, project discussion, and social > conversation — as well as special categories for dedicated workflows. Thank you for the work you put in to organizing and setting this up. > In Project Discussion, each different Fedora team can have its own tag, > and you can subscribe to those that you’re interested in. Cross-posting > is easy: tag a post with multiple teams. Are there measures in place to avoid tag sprawl that makes it difficult to keep an eye on everything and subscribe? > Topics can be renamed, if needed, or split out into side-conversations. > The long tangents from these conversations can actually be interesting > on their own without distracting from the main topic. Moderation tools > allow us to handle posts that are outside of expected Fedora > contributor behavior, with varying levels of action as appropriate. That is nice side effect of having a centralized platform. Of course, it can't solve problematic behavior, but it's nice to know that there's mitigation in place. It's just a question of whether these tools are used effectively and fairly and not excessively. I think I trust y'all to do that :). Still, I'd hope it's possible to improve moderation and encourage healthy dialogue without kludges. > You can use markdown formatting, including images (with easy addition > of alt text for people for whom images are a barrier). You can edit > your posts to fix typos or correct mistakes. There are polls and lots > of other useful features. These are definitely nice to have. I will note that these are incompatible with plain text email notifications which many here appreciate. > And, you can interact with it all by email. That interface isn’t > perfect, but it’s way better than any other forum software I’ve seen. > (I’ve written a guide: https://discussion.fedoraproject.org/t/25960) > At the same time, your individual email address is hidden, so it won’t > be a spam magnet (or a target for off-list harassment, a problem we > unfortunately have with devel list). Yeah, I'm not sure the email interface is really comparable to the ML experience. You can't post directly via email without the whole moderation queue thing mentioned in your linked post. Email interaction seems to be a second class citizen. I'm not sure what the point in moving off the mailing list is if you keep suggesting ways that people can make forum software behave more like the mailing list that we already have. > That said, it is web-first software. (Or mobile, if that’s your thing.) > That requires some adjustment, I know. I hope opening up a Fedora > Discussion tab – or keeping one open — becomes an easy habit. I wouldn't like that much. The only tab I always have open is Matrix, and I'd prefer not to have to have more always open browser tabs. I already have an email client. > Not just Fedora > --------------- > > There’s a big trend towards Discourse in open source projects overall. > Python and Gnome have both migrated entirely from their mailing lists. > Ansible is working on it. Ansible's mailing lists have been mostly announcements for a while. The plan is to move discussions and announcements away from various Github issue trackers and Github Discussions in various organizations into a central place. Fedora's level of mailing list usage and participation is significantly larger. > Plus, there’s Rust, Kubernetes, Nextcloud, > Flathub, Grafana, Home Assistant, KDE, and I’m sure many others. I'd argue that this is a type of fragmentation. Each has its own site that users have to separately sign up for and follow. > Concrete proposal > ----------------- While I think it makes sense for new teams to consider adopting the forums instead of mailing lists, I am not convinced that we should shut down devel@ and alienate the _current_ devs who seem to favor the current approach. Thanks for listening, Maxwell -- Maxwell G (@gotmax23) Pronouns: He/They _______________________________________________ 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
