On 1/7/25 8:25 AM, Elliotte Rusty Harold wrote:
All third party proprietary systems not owned by the Apache Project come with risks, Github and Jira included. However Slack strikes me as particularly bad.
I'll weigh in as a lurker (largely a contributor to Maven through third party integration tooling and support).
1. It breaks the web architecture with unstable URLs.
Concur. I have found this to be surprising at times. > 2. The privacy practices are unclear, unstable, and user hostile. ... snip ...Where I've worked and Slack was introduced, it was brought on-prem and hosted. All comms never left the "enterprise." It's such that after a 5 year absence one employer's Slack still had all my comms, my account was reactivated and every comm, some almost nine years old, was there. Many ancillary issues come with this kind of Slack hosting, I'll enumerate if anyone wants them, but most are common sense.
3. Slack is just ugly and hard to use compared to email or Jira. OK, #3 is IMHO but #1 is bad and and #2 is awful. It's also painful to have to check multiple locations to figure out what's going on.
IMHO, Slack is just IRC with a polished client (originally Electron as I recall). IFAIK, Slack even directly provides gateways to the big IRC networks... or did.
I still harbor some fire about how IRC got overshadowed by a slick client that hides the more esoteric operations of IRC from the masses.
I've used Slack when I'm paid to, but otherwise I avoid it these days, including in open source development. It's just too painful and it's been getting worse over time.
Concur.
I'd like to propose that we simply stop using Slack for project wide communications. Discussion about Maven related things can take place in the mailing list or the issue tracker. Between that, communication is well covered. Thoughts?
See above. But concur.GitHub, GitLab, et al., have some powerful tools for communications inline with merge requests like Reviews and Suggestions (that can be applied directly in the MR) and all tied to the originating Issue. I like this because it keeps the record of the development thread to merge.
...snip... -- Timothy Stone ============= Some call me ... Tim. Husband, Father, Blogger, OSS, Architect, Wargamer, Home Brewer, and 🤓 Find me on GitLab | GitHub | Linked In | MeWe | GnuPG
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