It does not really matter how developer discussions take place as long as they are documented and searchable. Transparency of reasoning behind decisions is just as important as the decision for anyone trying to understand the code base. For medium and large development, I advocate for something like pythons PEPs. For smaller stuff, I see nothing wrong with grabbing chunks of IRC or mailing list discussions and copying them into bug reports or just using the bug report for the discussion (the bug number/url/pep can then be referenced as a comment in the code).
-Simon On Sun, Jul 22, 2012 at 11:23 AM, Tristan Van Berkom <t...@gnome.org> wrote: > On Sun, Jul 22, 2012 at 6:20 AM, John Emmas <john...@tiscali.co.uk> wrote: > > On 22 Jul 2012, at 02:14, Michael Torrie wrote: > > > >> > >> I consider web-based forums to be the scourge of the internet. > >> > > > > Curiously, that's exactly how I feel about mailing lists. Mailing lists > work well as long as the volume of traffic is relatively low. They > probably also work well if you're a dedicated user who's willing to install > and configure an email client that supports them. But once they start > becoming busy, mailing lists become a turn-off for the average user who > doesn't want that level of sophistication and doesn't need to be involved > in most of the discussions. > > > > Taking myself as an example... during the past 3 years I've probably > signed up to 30 mailing lists. Today, only 3 of those subscriptions are > still active. I've unsubscribed from the other 27. > > > > Conversely, I've never unsubscribed from a web forum. There are plenty > of forums that I use only rarely - but I've never unsubscribed from one. I > still feel a connection to the relevant community, even if I rarely use it. > But I don't feel any connection at all to a community once I've > unsubscribed from its mailing list. > > > > So if the aim is to make users feel more engaged / more connected, I > don't believe that mailing lists are helpful. In fact, if that's what > you're trying to achieve I'd go as far as saying that mailing lists are > actually a hindrance. Whilst they can (and do) build a strong sense of > community between developers and the more dedicated users, the high volume > of traffic (which often isn't of much interest to the more casual user) > makes them feel irrelevant and excluded. That's been my experience anyway. > > No I don't think that is the aim at all. > > The point is about developers, not users. Mailing lists are the only > proven way I know of > for coherently developing a product with many developers in many time > zones. > > This point is critical, after that... with remaining efforts left over > from developing said > software, or by the efforts of other unrelated contributors: help > forums and better > documentation can be written... none of that happens without the first > thing though, > i.e. the software being written by the developers who communicate on a > mailing list. > > Support for users need not be delivered in the form of a mailing list, > but since there are > mailing lists for them... no reason to take that away from them > either... I'm sure there > are some user forums for GTK+ out in the wild as well. > > Cheers, > -Tristan > _______________________________________________ > gtk-devel-list mailing list > gtk-devel-list@gnome.org > https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/gtk-devel-list >
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