[CentOS-devel] Gauging interest in Discourse

Mon Oct 31 19:06:03 UTC 2022
Neal Gompa <ngompa13 at gmail.com>

On Mon, Oct 31, 2022 at 2:57 PM Shaun McCance <shaunm at 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.)


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