Hi all,
You might be aware that there is a CentOS category on the Fedora Discourse instance:
https://discussion.fedoraproject.org/c/centos/71
There have been some discussions about having a dedicated Discourse instance for CentOS. Discourse has a lot of advantages, such as better moderation and integration with our accounts system. But I understand that many people are comfortable with their existing workflows.
There's no point in running Discourse if it doesn't get enough buy-in. So I'm asking for input on using Discourse for various things:
* Project announcements, like events, meetings, and infra changes
* Activity reports, such as for SIGs and events
* User support, replacing forums.centos.org
* Development of Stream itself, basically centos-devel
* Development of stuff inside SIGs
* Replacement for the comments section of the blog
* Alternatively, just replacing the blog entirely
* Something else I'm not thinking of
Thanks, Shaun McCance CentOS Community Architect Red Hat Open Source Program Office
On Mon, Oct 31, 2022 at 2:57 PM Shaun McCance shaunm@redhat.com wrote:
Hi all,
You might be aware that there is a CentOS category on the Fedora Discourse instance:
https://discussion.fedoraproject.org/c/centos/71
There have been some discussions about having a dedicated Discourse instance for CentOS. Discourse has a lot of advantages, such as better moderation and integration with our accounts system. But I understand that many people are comfortable with their existing workflows.
There's no point in running Discourse if it doesn't get enough buy-in. So I'm asking for input on using Discourse for various things:
Why can't we do all of the below in the Fedora Discourse instance with dedicated categories?
josh
Project announcements, like events, meetings, and infra changes
Activity reports, such as for SIGs and events
User support, replacing forums.centos.org
Development of Stream itself, basically centos-devel
Development of stuff inside SIGs
Replacement for the comments section of the blog
Alternatively, just replacing the blog entirely
Something else I'm not thinking of
Thanks, Shaun McCance CentOS Community Architect Red Hat Open Source Program Office
CentOS-devel mailing list CentOS-devel@centos.org https://lists.centos.org/mailman/listinfo/centos-devel
On Mon, Oct 31, 2022 at 3:05 PM Josh Boyer jwboyer@redhat.com wrote:
On Mon, Oct 31, 2022 at 2:57 PM Shaun McCance shaunm@redhat.com wrote:
Hi all,
You might be aware that there is a CentOS category on the Fedora Discourse instance:
https://discussion.fedoraproject.org/c/centos/71
There have been some discussions about having a dedicated Discourse instance for CentOS. Discourse has a lot of advantages, such as better moderation and integration with our accounts system. But I understand that many people are comfortable with their existing workflows.
There's no point in running Discourse if it doesn't get enough buy-in. So I'm asking for input on using Discourse for various things:
Why can't we do all of the below in the Fedora Discourse instance with dedicated categories?
You can only have one level of hierarchy in Discourse. If we were going to do significant stuff in Discourse, we're better off on our own instance.
-- 真実はいつも一つ！/ Always, there's only one truth!
On Mon, Oct 31, 2022 at 3:08 PM Neal Gompa ngompa13@gmail.com wrote:
On Mon, Oct 31, 2022 at 3:05 PM Josh Boyer jwboyer@redhat.com wrote:
On Mon, Oct 31, 2022 at 2:57 PM Shaun McCance shaunm@redhat.com wrote:
Hi all,
You might be aware that there is a CentOS category on the Fedora Discourse instance:
https://discussion.fedoraproject.org/c/centos/71
There have been some discussions about having a dedicated Discourse instance for CentOS. Discourse has a lot of advantages, such as better moderation and integration with our accounts system. But I understand that many people are comfortable with their existing workflows.
There's no point in running Discourse if it doesn't get enough buy-in. So I'm asking for input on using Discourse for various things:
Why can't we do all of the below in the Fedora Discourse instance with dedicated categories?
You can only have one level of hierarchy in Discourse. If we were going to do significant stuff in Discourse, we're better off on our own instance.
I don't get it. Please bear with me, because I am definitely not conversant in Discourse.
We have centos/ today. There is nothing that says we can't have centos-SIG/ as a category, right?
josh
On Mon, Oct 31, 2022 at 3:12 PM Josh Boyer jwboyer@redhat.com wrote:
On Mon, Oct 31, 2022 at 3:08 PM Neal Gompa ngompa13@gmail.com wrote:
On Mon, Oct 31, 2022 at 3:05 PM Josh Boyer jwboyer@redhat.com wrote:
On Mon, Oct 31, 2022 at 2:57 PM Shaun McCance shaunm@redhat.com wrote:
Hi all,
You might be aware that there is a CentOS category on the Fedora Discourse instance:
https://discussion.fedoraproject.org/c/centos/71
There have been some discussions about having a dedicated Discourse instance for CentOS. Discourse has a lot of advantages, such as better moderation and integration with our accounts system. But I understand that many people are comfortable with their existing workflows.
There's no point in running Discourse if it doesn't get enough buy-in. So I'm asking for input on using Discourse for various things:
Why can't we do all of the below in the Fedora Discourse instance with dedicated categories?
You can only have one level of hierarchy in Discourse. If we were going to do significant stuff in Discourse, we're better off on our own instance.
I don't get it. Please bear with me, because I am definitely not conversant in Discourse.
We have centos/ today. There is nothing that says we can't have centos-SIG/ as a category, right?
We could. It gets super-messy though because the second level is then hashtags/labels, which are global.
So you have to tag topics to sort them further, because you can only have one level of categories. At that point, you start getting lots of collisions and confusion between Fedora and CentOS topics.
It's very different from virtually all other forum solutions. Arguably, the structure isn't very good, but Discourse is the popular solution this decade, so...
-- 真実はいつも一つ！/ Always, there's only one truth!
On Mon, Oct 31, 2022 at 03:11:45PM -0400, Josh Boyer wrote:
Why can't we do all of the below in the Fedora Discourse instance with dedicated categories?
You can only have one level of hierarchy in Discourse. If we were going to do significant stuff in Discourse, we're better off on our own instance.
There is a config option (and something they provide in the Enterprise hosting level of their SaaS) to enable category nesting up to three deep.
(I'm planning to use that as we merge in Ask Fedora — the current "Common Issues" category there has "Proposed Common Issues" and "Archived Common Issues" as subcategories. That will get lifted over to be three deep.)
But: I've become pretty convinced that deep category nesting in forums isn't usually the right approach for seperating what we might have as topic-based mailing lists. For that, tags have some nice properties — like, you can tag a post with multiple subjects, making easy to cross-post.
I think different categories are better when there are big, high-level functional differences in posting permissions, moderation teams, tagging requirements, priority in search, and so on. This is how we have the Fedora Discussion site structured now.
I don't get it. Please bear with me, because I am definitely not conversant in Discourse.
We have centos/ today. There is nothing that says we can't have centos-SIG/ as a category, right?
I'll let y'all come up with the structure, but if we keep it on the one site, I'd put it all under #centos. Possibly:
#centos/ announcements user help (tags for versions and for hardware/networking/security) project discussion (tags for sigs here) social (maybe... or share the Fedora water cooler...)
I see advantages and disadvantages to both this approach and the separate-site approach. A shared site, obviously, makes collaboration and cross-communication easier. A separate site would allow for more flexbility of structure (maybe y'all don't want to organize the site like Fedora does at all) and of things like "which categories are subscribed by default".
Plus, of course, you can show off your own purple branding more dramatically with a separate site. :)
On Mon, 2022-10-31 at 15:05 -0400, Josh Boyer wrote:
On Mon, Oct 31, 2022 at 2:57 PM Shaun McCance shaunm@redhat.com wrote:
Hi all,
You might be aware that there is a CentOS category on the Fedora Discourse instance:
https://discussion.fedoraproject.org/c/centos/71
There have been some discussions about having a dedicated Discourse instance for CentOS. Discourse has a lot of advantages, such as better moderation and integration with our accounts system. But I understand that many people are comfortable with their existing workflows.
There's no point in running Discourse if it doesn't get enough buy- in. So I'm asking for input on using Discourse for various things:
Why can't we do all of the below in the Fedora Discourse instance with dedicated categories?
Just want to say that this is entirely an option, although I agree with the points Neal raises about how Discourse organizes stuff. Definitely the less stuff we commit to doing on Discourse, the more enticing it is to just use Fedora's. I did recently see somebody asking how to not get CentOS content in their Fedora Discourse digest. I don't know how widespread that is.
-- Shaun
On Tue, Nov 01, 2022 at 09:41:18AM -0400, Shaun McCance wrote:
Just want to say that this is entirely an option, although I agree with the points Neal raises about how Discourse organizes stuff. Definitely the less stuff we commit to doing on Discourse, the more enticing it is to just use Fedora's. I did recently see somebody asking how to not get CentOS content in their Fedora Discourse digest. I don't know how widespread that is.
It's fairly easy to do this -- you can Mute a category to hide it entirely, or just mark it Normal rather than Watched or Tracking. (Tracking means no notifications but you get a count of new posts on the website. Watching means notifications for all new topics and replies to those. There is also Watching First Post, which means new topics but not notifications for replies.)
For Fedora Discussion, I have the defaults set up like this:
* Watching: none * Watching first post: News & Announcements * Tracking: Community Blog, Podcast * Muted: Copr, Team Workflows (and all subcategories of that)
Everything else is "normal", which means you won't get notifications except for topics or tags you've subscribed to, either by interacting with a topic or by subscribing intentionally. (Then, the idea is: subscribe to a tag like you would a mailing list.)
There's no easy way to make different defaults for CentOS or Fedora-focused people on the same site.
As a more advanced thing, we _could_ make people choose something like "Primary interests: Getting Help with Fedora / Contributing to Fedora / CentOS Stuff" at the beginning and then wire up something to change the defaults accordingly. Or, with something I'm already working on, we will be able to change defaults based on Fedora Account System group membership.
But all of that is advanced.
On Tue, Nov 01, 2022 at 09:41:18AM -0400, Shaun McCance wrote:
Just want to say that this is entirely an option, although I agree with the points Neal raises about how Discourse organizes stuff. Definitely the less stuff we commit to doing on Discourse, the more enticing it is to just use Fedora's. I did recently see somebody asking how to not get CentOS content in their Fedora Discourse digest. I don't know how widespread that is.
Oh, yeah, there's another thing -- the site composes a digest, sent by default if you've been inactive for a while. Muting a category should prevent it from being included in the digest.
https://meta.discourse.org/t/admin-guide-to-activity-summary-emails/36627
On Mon, Oct 31, 2022 at 2:57 PM Shaun McCance shaunm@redhat.com wrote:
Hi all,
You might be aware that there is a CentOS category on the Fedora Discourse instance:
https://discussion.fedoraproject.org/c/centos/71
There have been some discussions about having a dedicated Discourse instance for CentOS. Discourse has a lot of advantages, such as better moderation and integration with our accounts system. But I understand that many people are comfortable with their existing workflows.
There's no point in running Discourse if it doesn't get enough buy-in. So I'm asking for input on using Discourse for various things:
Project announcements, like events, meetings, and infra changes
Activity reports, such as for SIGs and events
User support, replacing forums.centos.org
Development of Stream itself, basically centos-devel
Development of stuff inside SIGs
Replacement for the comments section of the blog
Alternatively, just replacing the blog entirely
Something else I'm not thinking of
From my point of view, I'd look at a CentOS Discourse as a replacement
for the older CentOS Forums. I would rather not replace the developer discussions with Discourse, but user support and engagement places, sure.
Activity reports and such should be going out to the blog because that's how the media is going to pick it up. Notably, the CentOS Hyperscale SIG is continuously in the news because we did the extremely simple thing of always having our reports on the blog. SIGs that don't do that don't get talked about. They don't get mindshare, and they don't get growth and further interest.
I prefer the mailing list for developer discussions because it allows me to tag people into discussions easily enough. However, CentOS Stream development is currently not in a very good place because almost nobody from RHEL engineering is here. Same goes for the IRC channels and any other medium. CentOS Stream development remains horrifically opaque, and that is a bug. Unless things change at some point, most mailing lists could be closed with not that much impact, since there's no communication anyway.
(As an aside, the amount of backchannel effort I have to do to even get stuff to be *looked at* is pretty awful. If we want this to be a successful project, the mindset of how people are supposed to work with RHEL developers needs to change.)
On Mon, Oct 31, 2022 at 3:06 PM Neal Gompa ngompa13@gmail.com wrote:
On Mon, Oct 31, 2022 at 2:57 PM Shaun McCance shaunm@redhat.com wrote:
Hi all,
You might be aware that there is a CentOS category on the Fedora Discourse instance:
https://discussion.fedoraproject.org/c/centos/71
There have been some discussions about having a dedicated Discourse instance for CentOS. Discourse has a lot of advantages, such as better moderation and integration with our accounts system. But I understand that many people are comfortable with their existing workflows.
There's no point in running Discourse if it doesn't get enough buy-in. So I'm asking for input on using Discourse for various things:
Project announcements, like events, meetings, and infra changes
Activity reports, such as for SIGs and events
User support, replacing forums.centos.org
Development of Stream itself, basically centos-devel
Development of stuff inside SIGs
Replacement for the comments section of the blog
Alternatively, just replacing the blog entirely
Something else I'm not thinking of
From my point of view, I'd look at a CentOS Discourse as a replacement for the older CentOS Forums. I would rather not replace the developer discussions with Discourse, but user support and engagement places, sure.
Activity reports and such should be going out to the blog because that's how the media is going to pick it up. Notably, the CentOS Hyperscale SIG is continuously in the news because we did the extremely simple thing of always having our reports on the blog. SIGs that don't do that don't get talked about. They don't get mindshare, and they don't get growth and further interest.
I do like the blog posts. Those from Hyperscaler are quite nice.
I prefer the mailing list for developer discussions because it allows me to tag people into discussions easily enough. However, CentOS Stream development is currently not in a very good place because almost nobody from RHEL engineering is here. Same goes for the IRC channels and any other medium. CentOS Stream development remains horrifically opaque, and that is a bug. Unless things change at some point, most mailing lists could be closed with not that much impact, since there's no communication anyway.
What kind of communication/interaction are you expecting?
josh
(As an aside, the amount of backchannel effort I have to do to even get stuff to be *looked at* is pretty awful. If we want this to be a successful project, the mindset of how people are supposed to work with RHEL developers needs to change.)
-- 真実はいつも一つ！/ Always, there's only one truth! _______________________________________________ CentOS-devel mailing list CentOS-devel@centos.org https://lists.centos.org/mailman/listinfo/centos-devel
On Mon, Oct 31, 2022 at 3:09 PM Josh Boyer jwboyer@redhat.com wrote:
On Mon, Oct 31, 2022 at 3:06 PM Neal Gompa ngompa13@gmail.com wrote:
On Mon, Oct 31, 2022 at 2:57 PM Shaun McCance shaunm@redhat.com wrote:
Hi all,
You might be aware that there is a CentOS category on the Fedora Discourse instance:
https://discussion.fedoraproject.org/c/centos/71
There have been some discussions about having a dedicated Discourse instance for CentOS. Discourse has a lot of advantages, such as better moderation and integration with our accounts system. But I understand that many people are comfortable with their existing workflows.
There's no point in running Discourse if it doesn't get enough buy-in. So I'm asking for input on using Discourse for various things:
Project announcements, like events, meetings, and infra changes
Activity reports, such as for SIGs and events
User support, replacing forums.centos.org
Development of Stream itself, basically centos-devel
Development of stuff inside SIGs
Replacement for the comments section of the blog
Alternatively, just replacing the blog entirely
Something else I'm not thinking of
From my point of view, I'd look at a CentOS Discourse as a replacement for the older CentOS Forums. I would rather not replace the developer discussions with Discourse, but user support and engagement places, sure.
Activity reports and such should be going out to the blog because that's how the media is going to pick it up. Notably, the CentOS Hyperscale SIG is continuously in the news because we did the extremely simple thing of always having our reports on the blog. SIGs that don't do that don't get talked about. They don't get mindshare, and they don't get growth and further interest.
I do like the blog posts. Those from Hyperscaler are quite nice.
I prefer the mailing list for developer discussions because it allows me to tag people into discussions easily enough. However, CentOS Stream development is currently not in a very good place because almost nobody from RHEL engineering is here. Same goes for the IRC channels and any other medium. CentOS Stream development remains horrifically opaque, and that is a bug. Unless things change at some point, most mailing lists could be closed with not that much impact, since there's no communication anyway.
What kind of communication/interaction are you expecting?
On the mailing list, it'd be nice to see RHEL developer folks notifying folks of big changes landing (like what Alexander Bokovoy and Florian Weimer do from time to time) so that the community can give feedback and test. Also, having RHEL folks on the mailing list would mean that we can make the happy path for contributors trying to reach RHEL folks about contributions much simpler. On the IRC channel, it'd just be good to see them hanging out so the discussions in there could be more productive and useful.
There's also the problem of not being able to figure out who is the maintainer for a package to contact them when sending merge requests. It seems GitLab emails go to /dev/null for a lot of them, which makes things difficult overall.
On Mon, Oct 31, 2022 at 3:30 PM Neal Gompa ngompa13@gmail.com wrote:
On Mon, Oct 31, 2022 at 3:09 PM Josh Boyer jwboyer@redhat.com wrote:
On Mon, Oct 31, 2022 at 3:06 PM Neal Gompa ngompa13@gmail.com wrote:
On Mon, Oct 31, 2022 at 2:57 PM Shaun McCance shaunm@redhat.com wrote:
Hi all,
You might be aware that there is a CentOS category on the Fedora Discourse instance:
https://discussion.fedoraproject.org/c/centos/71
There have been some discussions about having a dedicated Discourse instance for CentOS. Discourse has a lot of advantages, such as better moderation and integration with our accounts system. But I understand that many people are comfortable with their existing workflows.
There's no point in running Discourse if it doesn't get enough buy-in. So I'm asking for input on using Discourse for various things:
Project announcements, like events, meetings, and infra changes
Activity reports, such as for SIGs and events
User support, replacing forums.centos.org
Development of Stream itself, basically centos-devel
Development of stuff inside SIGs
Replacement for the comments section of the blog
Alternatively, just replacing the blog entirely
Something else I'm not thinking of
From my point of view, I'd look at a CentOS Discourse as a replacement for the older CentOS Forums. I would rather not replace the developer discussions with Discourse, but user support and engagement places, sure.
Activity reports and such should be going out to the blog because that's how the media is going to pick it up. Notably, the CentOS Hyperscale SIG is continuously in the news because we did the extremely simple thing of always having our reports on the blog. SIGs that don't do that don't get talked about. They don't get mindshare, and they don't get growth and further interest.
I do like the blog posts. Those from Hyperscaler are quite nice.
I prefer the mailing list for developer discussions because it allows me to tag people into discussions easily enough. However, CentOS Stream development is currently not in a very good place because almost nobody from RHEL engineering is here. Same goes for the IRC channels and any other medium. CentOS Stream development remains horrifically opaque, and that is a bug. Unless things change at some point, most mailing lists could be closed with not that much impact, since there's no communication anyway.
What kind of communication/interaction are you expecting?
On the mailing list, it'd be nice to see RHEL developer folks notifying folks of big changes landing (like what Alexander Bokovoy and Florian Weimer do from time to time) so that the community can give feedback and test. Also, having RHEL folks on the mailing list
We've been trying to encourage more of that. I agree it's very beneficial, even if the people providing the posts get very little response.
would mean that we can make the happy path for contributors trying to reach RHEL folks about contributions much simpler. On the IRC channel, it'd just be good to see them hanging out so the discussions in there could be more productive and useful.
I try to pull in relevant people when a conversation comes up that I think they could contribute to. The issue as far as I can see is there's very little chatter in the IRC channels in general.
There's also the problem of not being able to figure out who is the maintainer for a package to contact them when sending merge requests. It seems GitLab emails go to /dev/null for a lot of them, which makes things difficult overall.
Why do you need to contact them outside of the MR itself? The maintainers should be watching their projects and getting notifications that way. Notably, there are several packages that have multiple maintainers and cascading a bunch of email addresses for people to email after an MR is filed isn't really something we're going for.
If you need to contact them because they don't respond at all, then we're working on that. If it's "they don't merge my stuff fast enough or tell me what to do instead", then I would say we need to be careful we're not conflating contribution with priority.
josh
On Mon, Oct 31, 2022 at 3:40 PM Josh Boyer jwboyer@redhat.com wrote:
On Mon, Oct 31, 2022 at 3:30 PM Neal Gompa ngompa13@gmail.com wrote:
On Mon, Oct 31, 2022 at 3:09 PM Josh Boyer jwboyer@redhat.com wrote:
On Mon, Oct 31, 2022 at 3:06 PM Neal Gompa ngompa13@gmail.com wrote:
On Mon, Oct 31, 2022 at 2:57 PM Shaun McCance shaunm@redhat.com wrote:
Hi all,
You might be aware that there is a CentOS category on the Fedora Discourse instance:
https://discussion.fedoraproject.org/c/centos/71
There have been some discussions about having a dedicated Discourse instance for CentOS. Discourse has a lot of advantages, such as better moderation and integration with our accounts system. But I understand that many people are comfortable with their existing workflows.
There's no point in running Discourse if it doesn't get enough buy-in. So I'm asking for input on using Discourse for various things:
Project announcements, like events, meetings, and infra changes
Activity reports, such as for SIGs and events
User support, replacing forums.centos.org
Development of Stream itself, basically centos-devel
Development of stuff inside SIGs
Replacement for the comments section of the blog
Alternatively, just replacing the blog entirely
Something else I'm not thinking of
From my point of view, I'd look at a CentOS Discourse as a replacement for the older CentOS Forums. I would rather not replace the developer discussions with Discourse, but user support and engagement places, sure.
Activity reports and such should be going out to the blog because that's how the media is going to pick it up. Notably, the CentOS Hyperscale SIG is continuously in the news because we did the extremely simple thing of always having our reports on the blog. SIGs that don't do that don't get talked about. They don't get mindshare, and they don't get growth and further interest.
I do like the blog posts. Those from Hyperscaler are quite nice.
I prefer the mailing list for developer discussions because it allows me to tag people into discussions easily enough. However, CentOS Stream development is currently not in a very good place because almost nobody from RHEL engineering is here. Same goes for the IRC channels and any other medium. CentOS Stream development remains horrifically opaque, and that is a bug. Unless things change at some point, most mailing lists could be closed with not that much impact, since there's no communication anyway.
What kind of communication/interaction are you expecting?
On the mailing list, it'd be nice to see RHEL developer folks notifying folks of big changes landing (like what Alexander Bokovoy and Florian Weimer do from time to time) so that the community can give feedback and test. Also, having RHEL folks on the mailing list
We've been trying to encourage more of that. I agree it's very beneficial, even if the people providing the posts get very little response.
would mean that we can make the happy path for contributors trying to reach RHEL folks about contributions much simpler. On the IRC channel, it'd just be good to see them hanging out so the discussions in there could be more productive and useful.
I try to pull in relevant people when a conversation comes up that I think they could contribute to. The issue as far as I can see is there's very little chatter in the IRC channels in general.
There's a bit of a catch-22 there I think, I'm not sure how to resolve that...
There's also the problem of not being able to figure out who is the maintainer for a package to contact them when sending merge requests. It seems GitLab emails go to /dev/null for a lot of them, which makes things difficult overall.
Why do you need to contact them outside of the MR itself? The maintainers should be watching their projects and getting notifications that way. Notably, there are several packages that have multiple maintainers and cascading a bunch of email addresses for people to email after an MR is filed isn't really something we're going for.
If you need to contact them because they don't respond at all, then we're working on that. If it's "they don't merge my stuff fast enough or tell me what to do instead", then I would say we need to be careful we're not conflating contribution with priority.
It's the former rather than the latter. I would also say that having dead silence for months is not appropriate no matter what kind of misconstrued conflations people might think of.
-- 真実はいつも一つ！/ Always, there's only one truth!
On Mon, Oct 31, 2022 at 3:44 PM Neal Gompa ngompa13@gmail.com wrote:
On Mon, Oct 31, 2022 at 3:40 PM Josh Boyer jwboyer@redhat.com wrote:
On Mon, Oct 31, 2022 at 3:30 PM Neal Gompa ngompa13@gmail.com wrote:
On Mon, Oct 31, 2022 at 3:09 PM Josh Boyer jwboyer@redhat.com wrote:
On Mon, Oct 31, 2022 at 3:06 PM Neal Gompa ngompa13@gmail.com wrote:
On Mon, Oct 31, 2022 at 2:57 PM Shaun McCance shaunm@redhat.com wrote:
Hi all,
You might be aware that there is a CentOS category on the Fedora Discourse instance:
https://discussion.fedoraproject.org/c/centos/71
There have been some discussions about having a dedicated Discourse instance for CentOS. Discourse has a lot of advantages, such as better moderation and integration with our accounts system. But I understand that many people are comfortable with their existing workflows.
There's no point in running Discourse if it doesn't get enough buy-in. So I'm asking for input on using Discourse for various things:
Project announcements, like events, meetings, and infra changes
Activity reports, such as for SIGs and events
User support, replacing forums.centos.org
Development of Stream itself, basically centos-devel
Development of stuff inside SIGs
Replacement for the comments section of the blog
Alternatively, just replacing the blog entirely
Something else I'm not thinking of
From my point of view, I'd look at a CentOS Discourse as a replacement for the older CentOS Forums. I would rather not replace the developer discussions with Discourse, but user support and engagement places, sure.
Activity reports and such should be going out to the blog because that's how the media is going to pick it up. Notably, the CentOS Hyperscale SIG is continuously in the news because we did the extremely simple thing of always having our reports on the blog. SIGs that don't do that don't get talked about. They don't get mindshare, and they don't get growth and further interest.
I do like the blog posts. Those from Hyperscaler are quite nice.
I prefer the mailing list for developer discussions because it allows me to tag people into discussions easily enough. However, CentOS Stream development is currently not in a very good place because almost nobody from RHEL engineering is here. Same goes for the IRC channels and any other medium. CentOS Stream development remains horrifically opaque, and that is a bug. Unless things change at some point, most mailing lists could be closed with not that much impact, since there's no communication anyway.
What kind of communication/interaction are you expecting?
On the mailing list, it'd be nice to see RHEL developer folks notifying folks of big changes landing (like what Alexander Bokovoy and Florian Weimer do from time to time) so that the community can give feedback and test. Also, having RHEL folks on the mailing list
We've been trying to encourage more of that. I agree it's very beneficial, even if the people providing the posts get very little response.
would mean that we can make the happy path for contributors trying to reach RHEL folks about contributions much simpler. On the IRC channel, it'd just be good to see them hanging out so the discussions in there could be more productive and useful.
I try to pull in relevant people when a conversation comes up that I think they could contribute to. The issue as far as I can see is there's very little chatter in the IRC channels in general.
There's a bit of a catch-22 there I think, I'm not sure how to resolve that...
I'm not sure there's anything to resolve. IRC being vibrant isn't really a metric I'd consider critical to the project. Engagement in some form probably is, but it should be looked at in aggregate, not on a specific platform/channel basis.
There's also the problem of not being able to figure out who is the maintainer for a package to contact them when sending merge requests. It seems GitLab emails go to /dev/null for a lot of them, which makes things difficult overall.
Why do you need to contact them outside of the MR itself? The maintainers should be watching their projects and getting notifications that way. Notably, there are several packages that have multiple maintainers and cascading a bunch of email addresses for people to email after an MR is filed isn't really something we're going for.
If you need to contact them because they don't respond at all, then we're working on that. If it's "they don't merge my stuff fast enough or tell me what to do instead", then I would say we need to be careful we're not conflating contribution with priority.
It's the former rather than the latter. I would also say that having dead silence for months is not appropriate no matter what kind of misconstrued conflations people might think of.
I agree. To be clear, we're working on that for RHEL as a whole, not just CentOS Stream MRs. It is not uncommon for some bugs to be open for years in RHEL, much to my disliking.
josh
On Mon, 2022-10-31 at 15:06 -0400, Neal Gompa wrote:
Activity reports and such should be going out to the blog because that's how the media is going to pick it up. Notably, the CentOS Hyperscale SIG is continuously in the news because we did the extremely simple thing of always having our reports on the blog. SIGs that don't do that don't get talked about. They don't get mindshare, and they don't get growth and further interest.
Serious question: What is the actual difference (to readers and the press) between a WordPress instance where we post project updates and a section on a Discourse instance where we post the same stuff? Is it that it's easier to watch a whole site than some section? Is it just the visibility of having something called an official blog? Is it the RSS feed?
I'm not totally against the blog. I am my pretty strongly against blog comments on any platform that's not tied to our accounts system, but that's solvable without throwing out the whole thing. It's just that when I look at the content we produce, it makes me wonder if we really need to maintain a whole separate channel for it.
-- Shaun
On Tue, Nov 1, 2022 at 9:51 AM Shaun McCance shaunm@redhat.com wrote:
On Mon, 2022-10-31 at 15:06 -0400, Neal Gompa wrote:
Activity reports and such should be going out to the blog because that's how the media is going to pick it up. Notably, the CentOS Hyperscale SIG is continuously in the news because we did the extremely simple thing of always having our reports on the blog. SIGs that don't do that don't get talked about. They don't get mindshare, and they don't get growth and further interest.
Serious question: What is the actual difference (to readers and the press) between a WordPress instance where we post project updates and a section on a Discourse instance where we post the same stuff? Is it that it's easier to watch a whole site than some section? Is it just the visibility of having something called an official blog? Is it the RSS feed?
Yes to all three. It's also a lot less messy to follow and look at.
You could probably do something like what the Snapcraft people did and have a site generate blog posts from Discourse topics if you really don't want to use WordPress. That's how the Snapcraft documentation is done: https://snapcraft.io/docs
I'm not totally against the blog. I am my pretty strongly against blog comments on any platform that's not tied to our accounts system, but that's solvable without throwing out the whole thing. It's just that when I look at the content we produce, it makes me wonder if we really need to maintain a whole separate channel for it.
If we get our own Discourse instance, we can rewire the blog to use Discourse for comments, just like Fedora does.
Cf. https://communityblog.fedoraproject.org/youre-invited-to-the-fedora-linux-37...
On 31/10/2022 18:57, Shaun McCance wrote:
Hi all,
You might be aware that there is a CentOS category on the Fedora Discourse instance:
https://discussion.fedoraproject.org/c/centos/71
There have been some discussions about having a dedicated Discourse instance for CentOS. Discourse has a lot of advantages, such as better moderation and integration with our accounts system. But I understand that many people are comfortable with their existing workflows.
There's no point in running Discourse if it doesn't get enough buy-in. So I'm asking for input on using Discourse for various things:
Project announcements, like events, meetings, and infra changes
Activity reports, such as for SIGs and events
User support, replacing forums.centos.org
Development of Stream itself, basically centos-devel
Development of stuff inside SIGs
Replacement for the comments section of the blog
Alternatively, just replacing the blog entirely
Something else I'm not thinking of
Silly me, I thought we'd already had this discussion, at least twice.
The current CentOS forum moderators have no wish to continue once the CentOS 7 EOL date in 2024 comes and goes. There was discussion in various tickets about replacing it with a CentOS Discourse and one was set up and is running. There is a forum notice on the current CentOS forums that points Stream users at that discourse instance as the Stream people said that they would take more part in answering questions there.
As far as I am concerned, that's it. It's done.
Trevor
On Mon, 2022-10-31 at 19:28 +0000, Trevor Hemsley wrote:
On 31/10/2022 18:57, Shaun McCance wrote:
Hi all,
You might be aware that there is a CentOS category on the Fedora Discourse instance:
https://discussion.fedoraproject.org/c/centos/71
There have been some discussions about having a dedicated Discourse instance for CentOS. Discourse has a lot of advantages, such as better moderation and integration with our accounts system. But I understand that many people are comfortable with their existing workflows.
There's no point in running Discourse if it doesn't get enough buy- in. So I'm asking for input on using Discourse for various things:
Project announcements, like events, meetings, and infra changes
Activity reports, such as for SIGs and events
User support, replacing forums.centos.org
Development of Stream itself, basically centos-devel
Development of stuff inside SIGs
Replacement for the comments section of the blog
Alternatively, just replacing the blog entirely
Something else I'm not thinking of
Silly me, I thought we'd already had this discussion, at least twice.
The current CentOS forum moderators have no wish to continue once the CentOS 7 EOL date in 2024 comes and goes. There was discussion in various tickets about replacing it with a CentOS Discourse and one was set up and is running. There is a forum notice on the current CentOS forums that points Stream users at that discourse instance as the Stream people said that they would take more part in answering questions there.
As far as I am concerned, that's it. It's done.
The link on the forums is to the CentOS section on the Fedora Discourse. This thread is explicitly about whether CentOS should have its own Discourse instance. If those conversations have been had, I wasn't part of them, and the people I've talked to so far haven't had much to say about those past conversations. This seems like an overly hostile response to a simple request for community input.
-- Shaun
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Josh Boyer -
Matthew Miller -
Neal Gompa -
Shaun McCance -
Trevor Hemsley