Re: Summary/Minutes from today's FESCo Meeting (2023-05-09)

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On Thu, May 11, 2023 at 3:23 AM Ralf Corsépius <rc040203@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>
>
>
> Am 11.05.23 um 09:09 schrieb Zbigniew Jędrzejewski-Szmek:
> > On Thu, May 11, 2023 at 12:22:09AM +0200, Kevin Kofler via devel wrote:
> >> Kevin Kofler via devel wrote:
> >>> So you folks were not happy with the feedback on the mailing list, so you
> >>> just made up a poll somewhere else.
> >> [snip]
> >>> Was that poll ever announced on the mailing list? Or did you just expect
> >>> people to magically notice it has popped up in the FESCo ticket?
> >>
> >> Sorry, looking at the FESCo ticket, I see the stats are actually just your
> >> subjective interpretation of the mailing list replies. Since I do not know
> >> who you counted in what category, I cannot tell whether your interpretation
> >> is correct or not.
> >
> > Mattdm put in the work to go over replies and count people's sentiment.
> > If you think he did a bad job, you can do your own calculation. I
> > doubt you'd get wildly different results. Please post them here.
>
> I am lacking words to express my sentiments about how MattDM and FESCO
> are treating Fedora, to say the least.
>

As I've said in the FESCo discussion, I actually don't like this idea
at all. I have tremendous reservations around forcing development
discussions of any kind into Discourse. But at the same time, I also
recognize that if we don't actually *try* it once, this will keep
coming up. This has been a background discussion from Matthew Miller
for at least five years now (and I'm on record for being in opposition
to it for just as long)[1].

If we don't actually try it with something, we're not going to see
what the outcomes are going to be.

To be honest, I think for the vast majority of the non-engineering
side of Fedora, mailing lists have been a terrible model. For example,
many of the SIGs that report up to the Mindshare Committee tend to
communicate with rich media, something that most people here don't use
even though email supports it. And the restrictions on email
attachments make it incredibly difficult to deal with too. Discourse
has been a boon for most of them because the communication mechanism
allows them to more fully represent their work as they're developing
it.

And when it comes to user support, mailing lists are horrible because
it's quite difficult to represent the problems people are having well
for basically the same reason. I've personally bemoaned the fact that
Fedora hasn't had a first-class forum system for users for most of the
time I've been here. Pretty much all of our competitors do (Ubuntu,
openSUSE, Manjaro, Arch, etc.) and we've always outsourced this to
fedoraforum.org (not that they're bad, but it makes no sense for them
to be third-party).

I deeply dislike the way Discourse works as a forum, but what else is
there now? I guess Vanilla, but that's a solution where there's a
mismatch in the "cloud" version and the self-hosted open source
version (at first glance, they might be completely different codebases
now!). At least in theory we should be able to self-host Discourse at
a moment's notice, provided we prove we can do that and test it
regularly. And porting to another forum software now is rife with
peril without significant investment.

For the engineering side that reports to FESCo? I think Discourse is a
much harder sell. Data durability and portability matters a lot more,
as our discussions are often used to inform others of the background
of our decision-making. We all know that the Fedora Changes process
(and its predecessor, the Fedora Features process) was designed to
make it very easy for Red Hat to review how Fedora Linux evolves so
when they branch Fedora Linux to make a Red Hat Enterprise Linux
release, they can maintain or revert significant Changes as desired.
But it's also used quite often by other distributions as a way to
identify things worth implementing. As someone who works in multiple
Linux distributions, I'm very mindful of how important Fedora is to
the larger Linux distribution community and so I want high-fidelity
archives of those discussions. For better or worse, email-based
communications are the only format with that property.

But that doesn't matter if we don't have anyone around to actually
*do* anything, and if Matthew is right that we will get higher quality
discussions with more engagement on Discourse, it might be worth it.
More participants doesn't necessarily mean better conversation, and if
we're exchanging one group for another, that might be worse. But we
won't know these things until we try it.

It was probably a mistake to say "Fedora 40 and onward" will use
Discourse for Change discussions, as it assumes success (which I don't
want to assume after many experiences in the past proving otherwise).
I would have preferred the trial limiting to just Fedora 40 and
reviewing it afterward. But we can also just force that review after
Fedora 40's development window closes anyway.

As it currently stands, this is a *trial* to see how it goes. If we
get crickets or low-quality discussion there, we'll put it back and
hopefully this won't come up again for another five years. :)

But if it works out... Well, we'll see.



[1]: https://lwn.net/Articles/768483/



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