[CentOS-devel] Gauging interest in Discourse

Mon Oct 31 19:29:09 UTC 2022
Neal Gompa <ngompa13 at gmail.com>

On Mon, Oct 31, 2022 at 3:09 PM Josh Boyer <jwboyer at redhat.com> wrote:
>
> On Mon, Oct 31, 2022 at 3:06 PM Neal Gompa <ngompa13 at gmail.com> wrote:
> >
> > 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 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.



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