On Fri, Oct 19, 2018 at 9:16 AM Gerald B. Cox <gb...@bzb.us> wrote: > > Again, I believe some are trying to do an apples to apples comparison with > Discourse and mailing list technologies. Discourse was build from the ground > up with the goal of fostering communication and collaboration. Hyperkitty is > a bolt on HTML to mailing list archives. It's good for what it is, but it > isn't Discourse - and usage numbers tend to bear that out. >
That's an unfair characterization. HyperKitty was designed from the ground up with that goal in mind too. The _sole_ difference is the backend approach. Discourse uses a database system while HyperKitty uses a mail list engine. You know why the usage numbers bear that out? Because the upgrade to HyperKitty was mishandled and delayed over and over. We were screwed over by the fact that our infrastructure doesn't run on Fedora, so that made it harder to get it working. The initial deployment was very slow and unoptimized. Bugs in the UI remained unfixed in Fedora's installation even though upstream fixed them. I would not be surprised if upstream ignores us because we don't seem to be upgrading. The development process for HyperKitty basically stalled out because migrations were impossible from Mailman 2 to Mailman 3 for a *very* long time. Fedora somehow did it, and that seemed to have not gone back upstream, so until *very recently*, upstream did not recommend doing mm2 to mm3 upgrades. That *completely* handicapped adoption of HyperKitty, because HyperKitty requires Mailman 3. What's worse, because it's almost impossible to run on RHEL due to the lack of Python 3 (which continues to anger and frustrate me), Red Hat never migrated their mailing lists. Red Hat's lists are one of the larger installations, and it was a real blow to not have that migrate. The irony that I can probably get SUSE to deploy Mailman 3 and HyperKitty before Red Hat will is not lost on me. > The fact is that email usage is declining. People are moving away from it > and prefer to use other platforms for collaboration. As with many things... > when something new comes out, there are a group of people who push back and > want things to stay as they are - history has proven time and time again, > that change is inevitable. If something new is the better solution, as > people become aware of it and use it - it will become the go to solution. > The examples are endless and span multiple disciplines. > You know what? I bounce back and forth between HyperKitty and my email client. If all the lists I subscribed to used HyperKitty, I wouldn't be using my email client at all. While I don't generally reply from HK, it's mainly because of bugs that I know are fixed in newer versions. We have not taken good care of our mail list infrastructure. I don't blame our infra team. I blame the fact our infra runs on RHEL, and RHEL has handicapped us in so many ways because of their own choices. Fedora can't control its own (infrastructure) destiny because we have no power to influence RHEL at all. And that's broken. > Fedora has a long history of supporting new and innovative solutions and > toolsets. That is what helps differentiate us as a distribution. We need a > tool that will encourage more participation. I believe Discourse will help > with this - people will discover new and more efficient ways to do their work > and the sun will rise the next day. > And yet, for 15 years, Fedora didn't have a web forum for user support. People have asked for it over the years, and Fedora refused. That's why things like FedoraForum.org exist instead of being part of Fedora itself. I'm a guy who started with web forums who later used email lists, not the other way around. I vastly prefer forum-style environments. I still don't like Discourse for this kind of stuff, because it's just not designed for handling contextual conversations. And there are problems with Discourse too: doing partial quoting with attribution is annoying and requires editing the quote to restore that information. In addition, searching for posts and topics becomes exponentially slower as the system handles more content, which is a huge problem if you're trying to find information to cross reference. It's also bad for archiving, since threads are inherently unstable. Conversation splitting and merging is very awkward (as I've observed in the Snapcraft Discourse). I can keep going, but it doesn't matter, because you're dead set on this anyway. -- 真実はいつも一つ！/ Always, there's only one truth! _______________________________________________ devel mailing list -- devel@lists.fedoraproject.org To unsubscribe send an email to devel-le...@lists.fedoraproject.org Fedora Code of Conduct: https://getfedora.org/code-of-conduct.html List Guidelines: https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Mailing_list_guidelines List Archives: https://lists.fedoraproject.org/archives/list/devel@lists.fedoraproject.org
