Hi Grant, I have been considering proposing the same thing myself for similar reasons, but I also have some doubts. More comments inline.
On Fri, Jul 17, 2015 at 7:28 PM, Grant Henke <ghe...@cloudera.com> wrote: > I think it could be useful to have a place to chat that is associated with > the Kafka repo. Agreed. > Note that we do currently have an IRC channel, but from my > experience its a ghost town. > I've recently joined #apache-kafka and activity is low, yes, but there is some[1]. The bigger issue, perhaps, is that contributors are not there. Do we think that this would be different with Gitter? And, if so, what is the reason? Is it because no application needs to be installed? In theory, IRCCloud provides something similar for IRC (although the limitations of the trial and the upgrade nagging can be annoying) and we could link to the channel in GitHub's readme. Also, are there any Apache projects who use Gitter? There was a thread in the Spark mailing list, but the response wasn't positive[2]. We would need Apache Infra to set-up Gitter for us as they are the only ones that have write access to the repository (the set-up is really easy though, which is definitely a positive). Gitter may be the right answer, I just want to make sure it actually helps us have a more active channel instead of splitting the existing activity between two channels. Thoughts? Best, Ismael [1] https://botbot.me/freenode/apache-kafka/2015-07-06/?tz=Europe/London [2] http://apache-spark-developers-list.1001551.n3.nabble.com/Gitter-chat-room-for-Spark-td11636.html
