On 4/21/23 02:57, Solomon Peachy via devel wrote:
On Thu, Apr 20, 2023 at 07:21:54PM -0400, Simo Sorce wrote:
Hi Matthew, you say: "We're missing people", and I think, "who?". And who are you going to miss if you move to discourse?
Again and again I have seen this "we're missing people" sentiment be used to justify scrapping "old" workflows, and *not once* has it ever resulted in "more people" coming out of the woodwork that would have happily contributed in the past, but were turned off/away by the need to use archaic email.
Funny, how from where I am sitting I can not really remember any time we managed to scrape the old workflow at least once. So I wouldn't be able to measure the effectiveness of such an imaginary thing. I can only see how we are unable to do changes and therefore we are always adding things on top of old ones, which of course doesn't make anything easier neither for those who want to change, nor for those who don't.
That's a slight exaggeration of course, but so is your statement. People come to Fedora via many ways. But I doubt any of it starts with e-mail nowadays. And the fact that you don't see newcomers _here_ actually proves the point, isn't it?
(FFS, If we're going to follow this to its logical conclusion, we should just scrap all of this email/discourse/whatever and just move everything to github, or even facebook, as that's clearly where the most numbers of people are. "but no, our custom tooling makes things better for us" is the inevitable pushback, which arguably applies just as much to email-based flows!)
The mailing list make messages land in my client, on which I am very efficient, therefore I can check all messages once a day, and respond if I find a worthy topic.
...and the very nature of Discourse or various other Forums pretty much make this sort of workflow impossible; that is to say you're all but forced to manually poll every site you care about in a way that all but makes automation impossible.
Discourse
1) sends email in a multipart format which has html and plain text(kind of markdown); 2) adds headers which allow you to filter the messages by topic or category on the client-side; 2) allows you to configure notifications for mentions per category or per tag; 3) allows to configure custom searches on the server side, and will notifies you for it.
Here is the example of the mail headers: ----------------------------------------
Message-ID: discourse/post/215862@discussion.fedoraproject.org In-Reply-To: discourse/post/215857@discussion.fedoraproject.org References: discourse/post/215855@discussion.fedoraproject.org discourse/post/215856@discussion.fedoraproject.org discourse/post/215857@discussion.fedoraproject.org List-Unsubscribe: <...> X-Discourse-Post-Id: 215862 X-Discourse-Topic-Id: 81258 X-Discourse-Category: Team Workflows/Fedora Magazine X-Auto-Response-Suppress: All Auto-Submitted: auto-generated Precedence: list List-ID: Fedora Discussion | Team Workflows Fedora Magazine <fedora-magazine.team-workflows.discussion.fedoraproject.org> List-Archive: https://discussion.fedoraproject.org/t/article-proposal-using-btrfs-to-upgra... Feedback-ID: fedoraproject:user_posted:discoursemail
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It is not perfect, and it requires some effort. But I don't see why it is impossible.
In other words, it's locally optimal for any given site, but is utterly incapable of scaling if you care about more than a small handful of sites.
Calling myself semi-active here would be quite generous, but I can uneqvocibly state that if I have to manually poll a discourse site or whatever, that will be the end of my participating in anything Fedora, except to report bugs via abrt (assuming I don't have to keep logging in for new API keys) I suspect I'm far from the only one in that respect.
Let's not get into a "who would you miss more" competition and work on a solution which actually helps us to bridge the gap and allows us to compromise between different use cases.
Unless this discourse has some great mail bridge (it doesn't) or maybe an rss feed (I do not use those at work, but I guess I could ?) So that I can skim messages on my terms, I think I (and those like me) will be the next "missing people".
RSS doesn't scale for higher volumes unless you're literally polling every few minutes or the feed includes a large number of entries.
Btw I could make exactly the same quote about any forum that Major made for Mailing lists, messy discussions are messy and a forum does not make them easier to follow by any means (perhaps except for those that chose inferior email readers).
Yeah.
Your own post communicates to me (whether you intended it or not) that in the end the thread that will be generated by this post won't matter, because this is just a courtesy post and you already think that the opinion of the "minority of self selected mailing list lovers and dinosaurs" does not matter much.
Unfortunately, I have to agree with this perception. Perhaps it's because I've seen so many other formerly e-mail based communities bifrucate [1] chasing after "engagagement" that never occurs, or even RH/Fedora's near-perfect abysmal record of framing core infrastructure changes like this as a "discussion" when the decision has already been made and will happen no matter what the masses have to say about it.
At the end of the day, distro development, like most other infrastructure, isn't sexy or glamorous, and the humongous effort that goes into it is rarely rewarded with anything other than abuse. "Who cares about distros? I just use Docker containers!"
In all seriousness, I would advise you to hang out at the current discussion.fedoraproject.org and feel the vibe a bit.
Distributions _are_ cool and sexy. And people have ideas and interest in them. Some of them are totally wrong and misplaced, some may be very old, and some are better. But that's how it should be.
It seems you feel like you are cornered, but it is you who put yourself in the corner by ignoring the part of the community, which actually can and wants to support you.
[1] Splitting into the "core" developers (ie those paid/compensated for participating) and an endless summer of newbs seeking help/support; the middle gets completely hollowed out.
- Solomon