I can see the advantages having an additional focussed collaborative tool within Fossil - it would be a very useful feature for small groups to discuss design decisions/progress and bug fixing. Linking to email especially for the bug tracker has also been a long requested feature. I can see this as a very useful feature for discussion & focussed development within a a small /medium sized team. I would also like to see something like the Kanban style board showcased a couple of years back be integrated too as this would also be a major improvement to the bug tracker and aid collaboration (but that is a separate issue).
However, a forum for a bigger project like Fossil is bit different. the membership is much wider and members are not all part of the development team. The nature of the use case is different as well - it is not primarily to do with developing the project but rather to search for solution to a problem or advice on the best approach and possible solutions. It does not need to be so focussed on work allocation, attribution & blame/praise. The board should be easily searched and ideally tagged. There are numerous open source forum software options as outlined by previous contributors. Most/all support RSS notifications. I subscribe to a Discourse based board which works extremely well - it provides an email interface - you can receive emails for every post or only ones you chose to watch, ones you reply to or initiate. So you can use it as a lightweight RSS/email based subscription or access it via a full web interface. It is easy to search, supports markdown and has a simple clean interface. I am not sure about the capabilities of the other suggestions but I am sure they are generally capable and widely used. Whilst it is obviously important that the content of a forum is reliable, managing the posts within the repository as individual commits sounds like an unnecessary complication. Whilst it might seem very shallow, I think people jump to conclusions about the currency of a project by its look - I think that some of the more modern forum software options would help to support the belief that Fossil is alive and well. tl;dr Horses for Courses. I am really not sure it is worth reinventing the wheel as most of the alternative forum solutions are very capable. However a collaboration tool within Fossil would be a very good idea especially for a small team but I don’t think it would be so useful for this particular issue i.e. an open-access forum group. John Pateman > On 13 Jun 2018, at 22:12, Richard Hipp <d...@sqlite.org> wrote: > > On 6/13/18, Warren Young <war...@etr-usa.com> wrote: >>> Indeed, there are many advantages to just tacking a forum capability >>> onto Fossil. >> >> Let’s list them: >> >> 2. Everyone who clones a Fossil project repository would henceforth also get >> a clone of the project’s message traffic. > > This is not necessarily an advantage. We I have found is that forum > and ticket traffic far exceeds the amount of source code. Furthermore > this kind of traffic does not lend itself well to delta compression. > And so what you would likely encounter is that clones would swell > uncontrollably with most of the extra space going to extraneous and > noisy forum traffic. This is especially true if attachments are > allowed on forum posts, because what I have found is that you will > quickly accumulate many multi-megabyte incompressible screenshot > attachments. It doesn't take too many people attaching screenshots > off of their hi-res "retinue" screen to give you 1GB clone bandwidth > even for a smaller project. > >> >> 3. Forum posts can show up in the timeline. > > Yikes. I think I would certainly want that to be turned off by default. > >> >> 4. Forum posts will be able to ink to Fossil artifacts in the same way that >> checkin comments, wiki articles, and such can today. >> >> 5. Vice versa: a checkin comment can say “Closes issue raised in forum post >> [abcd1234]” and get an automatic *and durable* link to the post. (How many >> web mail archives have gone away or broken their link structure since the >> SQLite ML was started?) >> >> 6. Trivially-implemented delayed offline replies: sync the project repo >> before you go off-network, write your forum message replies on the airplane, >> in the tent, etc. then sync when you get back into the warm wifi bath to >> push all your replies out. >> > > These last three are nice ideas. But they depend on (2) which comes > with associated bandwidth and storage overhead. > > My current design does not automatically sync forum content. I might > add the ability to sync forum traffic separately, using a separate > command, just as one can now optionally sync unversioned content using > the "fossil uv sync" command. But that will come later, if at all. > > -- > D. Richard Hipp > d...@sqlite.org > _______________________________________________ > fossil-users mailing list > fossil-users@lists.fossil-scm.org > http://lists.fossil-scm.org:8080/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/fossil-users
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