* Matthew Miller: > Big threads are … bad, actually > ------------------------------- > > When we have something to talk about, it tends to explode into a big > thread. The thing in January with FESCo’s frame pointers decision > (https://lists.fedoraproject.org/archives/list/devel@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx/thread/RNJZUX3ZI34DIX6E4PVDKYQWCOFDQ4UY/#RNJZUX3ZI34DIX6E4PVDKYQWCOFDQ4UY) > is a good example of things going badly. > > Most of the conversation was under the subject “Schedule for Tuesday's > FESCo Meeting (2023-01-03)”, because everything started as a reply to > that. That’s pretty easy to overlook. It’s possible for replies to > change the subject when replying, but that can’t be done > retroactively, and then isn’t consistent (and it breaks threading in > Gmail, too). > > Then, things got rather hostile, making it hard to have a reasonable > conversation about the issues (both technical and procedural). And > then, things went in circles without adding anything new. > > This could have all gone a lot better. You brought up fairly concrete examples, but I don't see how the platform matters in those cases. Someone would need to shut down or delete (parts of) conversations more or less arbitrarily, even if they are not actively harmful as such, simply because they create too much work for others to follow. Surely that's not something you are willing to do? > 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. Do Fedora mailing lists reject mail from non-members, and redirect follow-ups? If they do that, that's the first thing you could fix. Then such discussions no longer would get split. > 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. Plus, there’s Rust, Kubernetes, Nextcloud, > Flathub, Grafana, Home Assistant, KDE, and I’m sure many others. All these instances are isolated. It's not possible to cross-post. This makes cross-project collaboration increasingly difficult because instead of Cc:ing another list, perhaps with a summary of the discussion so far, you have to create a completely new topic somewhere else, and then someone has to copy over summaries manually. (If I recall correctly, that currently doesn't work well with Fedora lists because they reject posts from non-members.) Personally, I have accounts on many, many Discourse instances, but I don't think there is a single one I read somewhat regularly. I find the mailing list mode and the notifications rather unpredictable. Maybe an alternative client could help (nndiscourse?), but as far as I understand it, there's no real API, so that's kind of hard? > 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. There's already a Fesco ticket for each change, why not use that for discussion? > Other teams who want to keep mailing lists can, but I’d like to move > those too, and eventually I think we’ll want to shut them down too — or > perhaps convert them to announcement lists. What about scm-commits? Thanks, Florian _______________________________________________ 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
