On to, 20 huhti 2023, Stephen Smoogen wrote:
On Thu, 20 Apr 2023 at 18:47, Matthew Miller mattdm@fedoraproject.org wrote:
On Thu, Apr 20, 2023 at 05:39:51PM -0400, Stephen Smoogen wrote:
I hate to ask this but could you give a more summarized version of this email? I realize you had a lot of reasoning you wanted to cover on the why's but I frankly got lost several times. That makes it really hard not to respond in ways which are overly emotional and not helpful. Anything I wrote would start with me trying to summarize what was written but
failing
to do so, or I would end up trying to pick apart different paragraphs in non-helpful ways.
Sure. I realize it is quite long.
I am proposing that over the course of 2023, starting with the Changes process, we move Fedora development conversations from this mailing list to the Discourse-based Fedora Discussion.
Many Fedora folks, new and old, can't keep with this list. The number of participants is down over time (even as the number of threads has risen). Many teams are moving away from devel list anyway -- using various scattered bug trackers as their effective "forum".
Discourse gives us better tools for the conversations we need to have as a project. I know it takes some getting used to, but I strongly believe it will be worth it.
Devel list actually covers a lot of different topics. Discourse lets us categorize those better while still keeping it all together.
The first thing I suggest moving is discussion around proposed Changes. This is a FESCo decision. The rest I won't duplicate here.
Thank you. I have a better understanding of where you are coming from, and what this meant to do. I don't like the solution, but I know all too well that the current mailman3 solution works on a wing and a prayer. It has been running an EOL version of the software for a long time and there are not enough infrastructure resources to do all the things that are needed for an upgrade AND keep builds going. I also understand that the general community of the lists has shrunk over the last 10 years with it becoming more and more 'the same old people complaining about the same old things'.
That said, I don't think I will be greatly active after the move. I have tried Discourse for a year, but have found it to be like every forum and BBS I have tried for the last 30 years.. frustrating and needy. I get tired and angry after 30 minutes and my replies start becoming the problem you don't want. [I realize this is how many people feel about email which causes them to drop out there.] If that lack of engagement requires me to orphan packages or other items, I completely understand.
My main trouble with Discourse and other places where I try to help people with answers to their questions is that forums promote a drive-by questions without further engagement. This experience is opposite to what forum proponents are claiming but I see it pretty consistently on Discourse, on Stackoverflow sites, on Reddit and in many other places.
In my area, identity management and authentication, the topics are complex enough to want to help others but lack of further engagement simply kills any interest to use a particular discussion board. If people asking questions aren't interested in getting the answers or even tying in the ends for their own questions, it comes hard to keep an interest in helping those people again and again.
I can point you to one specific topic on Fedora Discourse as an example: https://discussion.fedoraproject.org/t/fedora-login-bug-having-a-128-charact...
I would have supposed that someone would follow-up, right? As a FreeIPA maintainer in Fedora, as an upstream FreeIPA contributor and a contact for security issues, I have never been contacted with either details for what the thread claims to happen or never got any follow-up on the thread to my comments.
This is an experience I want to avoid. If this is what Matthew is proposing a Fedora development discussions to be, then sorry, this is not an improvement.