Hello Carlo, Carlo Zancanaro <[email protected]> writes:
> On Tue, Feb 10 2026, Sergio Pastor Pérez wrote: >> I'm not familiar with it, I think it does not provide the sync/async >> hybrid workflow that Zulip does. > > I think conflating sync and async communication is not purely positive. > > As someone who lives in a different timezone of the Guix > community (UTC+11 at the moment), I benefit from the separation between > sync/async communication in two ways: > > 1. I know what's expected for response times. With something like Zulip > it's not clear how long you should (or will) wait for responses. I think > the Zulip UI nudges you towards the sync paradigm, despite supporting > async well. If you get some quick responses then you may end up feeling > like you've resolved a conversation before everyone has had a chance to > be involved. This can make things go faster, but can also exclude people > who aren't able to engage at that pace. I've seen this happen in my own > distributed teams in the past, where people disengage entirely because > they're usually asleep during significant conversations. This is interesting. I'm not someone with experience using Zulip, so I really appreciate you feedback. I think this particular concern is something we should fix socially, rather than it being the responsibility of a tool. We can provide guidelines for the kind of behavior and response times we expect from participants of the project. I don't think this is something that can be fixed by using one tool or another, but I think it's a valid concern for which I propose to describe our expectations on our code of conduct. > 2. I don't feel pressure to keep up to date with what's happening on > IRC. I generally assume "if it's important, there will be a thread on > guix-devel about it", so I'm only on IRC opportunistically (and usually > just to help people who need help). The assumption that guix-devel is > the place to watch has already been partially eroded by the switch to > Codeberg (it's still async, but I find it much harder to keep track of > everything). Switching to Zulip would put more pressure on me to keep up > on the sync conversations to stay in the loop. Well, regarding this point, I would propose to not remove IRC, I know there are members of our community that value the ephemeral conversations that take place on this kind of platform. For that reason, I would propose to bridge IRC to a Zulip room. That way, newcomers could participate on the conversations from different timezones, without needing to setup a bouncer. I worry that some newcomers from faraway time-zones may be excluded from conversations or help due to the nature of IRC and them not having a bouncer, which increases the boundary for participation both economically and technically. > I'm not completely opposed to the idea, because I think Zulip is great, > but I would like us to be mindful of the costs of collapsing sync and > async communication into the same form. I think it is possible to avoid > these costs by establishing expectations carefully, but that won't > happen automatically. Thanks for the feedback, I'm sure we will be able to work out something that works for everyone. Best regards, Sergio
