Re: It’s time to transform the Fedora devel list into something new

[Kevin Fenzi]

On Fri, Apr 28, 2023 at 06:14:37PM +0200, Kevin Kofler via devel wrote:
> 
> Well, I see two (almost orthogonal) lines of argumentation here:
> * Matthew and others have proposed moving off the mailing list due to
>   alleged shortcomings that mailing lists have by design. The issue is that
>   this misses that Discourse has much worse shortcomings by design. (And "by
>   design" is usually synonymous with "unfixable".)

I know you maintain this, but I don't agree. I think it has some
shortcomings, but the advantages outweight those and we can try and
improve those.

> * Smooge has brought up that the mailing list has in his view been so badly
>   neglected over the last few years that it will have to be replaced anyway,
>   no matter whether the replacement is actually better or worse.

Well, there's work ongoing to clean up and package the current mailman3
stack, and it's getting closer. I personally see us moving to that so we
don't need to deal with that issue and can move things naturally as we
want instead of forced by support.

I guess the biggest timebomb is that the current host is rhel7 and that
goes end of life next year.
> 
> Do you not see my point here? You have gotten a sizable amount of feedback 
> pointing out showstoppers that make Discourse anywhere from impractical to 
> unusable for several existing contributors, many of which are by design and 
> will never be fixed, or at least require a lot of coding that nobody is 
> signing up for (e.g., an NNTP gateway, plus, that will also suffer from some 
> of the core limitations of the e-mail notification system, e.g., not picking 
> up edits (unless maybe if the gateway "cancels" the post and resends the 
> edited version? But NNTP post cancellation is not universally supported)). 

I see a number of people who expressed concerns and issues.
I hope that they go and look at the current email interface and find it
good enough to use. I think a lot of the early posts in this thread had
people unaware of how (or indeed if at all) they could interface with
discourse without using the web interface. I hope that people are more
aware now of the options.

> Yet, you are still set on pushing this change forward and already discussing 
> the next steps (FESCo vote, "fix[ing] some of the issues" (but you will 
> never be able to fix all of them because several are by design), 
> deployment). That, in my view, makes the RFC thread a farce, because the 
> option that ought to be the default (keep the status quo) appears to not 
> even be under discussion.

I was simply saying what the next step is. Keeping the status quo is
completely an option (at least short term) as FESCo might say "nope, we
don't want to do this". Now, if so, I hope there would be a "because we
require X, Y, Z" to work on in that case. I also can't speak for anyone
but myself, so the council could decide something here, but Matthew
clearly said he wanted to try this with changes and would ask FESCo, so
I don't see that happening. 

Anyhow, I strongly disagree that this is a farce.

kevin


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Re: It’s time to transform the Fedora devel list into something new

[Kevin Fenzi]

On Fri, Apr 28, 2023 at 08:15:28AM -0400, Solomon Peachy via devel wrote:
> On Thu, Apr 27, 2023 at 10:47:15AM -0700, Kevin Fenzi wrote:
> > Our discourse instance is hosted for us by discourse.
> > We shouldn't have to do maint on it, but we will have to do moderation,
> > etc. 
> 
> So... if maintaining discourse is too much overhead but it's okay to pay 
> someone else to handle, why can't that be done for our mailing list 
> infrastructure too?  Even if that service offering is proprietary?
> (hosted enterprise gitlab, anyone?)

We could, but as I have mentioned a number of times... it's not about
_our mailing lists_ it's about mailing lists in general.

Also, as Matthew mentioned somewhere in this megathread, it's actually a
difficult process to add a new vendor at Red Hat.

> And, for that matter, what of the other services currently 
> owned/hosted/maintained under the RH/Fedora roof?  (For example, we're 
> going to be having this conversation again in the not-so-distant future 
> once RH finishes switching over to Jira and stops funding our Bugzilla 
> instance's upkeep..)

Yep, someday I think we will. There is currently no plan I know about to
retire bugzilla, but there could well be someday.

kevin


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Re: It’s time to transform the Fedora devel list into something new

[Kevin Kofler via devel]

Kevin Fenzi wrote:
> I... don't understand how you reached that conclusion.
> 
> My current understanding is:
> * Matthew posted about a number of issues / concerns with mailing lists.
> These concerns are completely 100% unrelated to our current list
> infrastructure. If we had the very latest mailman3 from upstream running
> smoothly... it would still be a mailing list and it would really have
> almost all of the same concerns.
> 
> I completely understand where smooge is coming from here.

Well, I see two (almost orthogonal) lines of argumentation here:
* Matthew and others have proposed moving off the mailing list due to
  alleged shortcomings that mailing lists have by design. The issue is that
  this misses that Discourse has much worse shortcomings by design. (And "by
  design" is usually synonymous with "unfixable".)
* Smooge has brought up that the mailing list has in his view been so badly
  neglected over the last few years that it will have to be replaced anyway,
  no matter whether the replacement is actually better or worse.

> Am I frustrated at the current state of our mailing list infrastructre?
> Oh so very much.
> Do I hope we can make it better?
> Oh so very much.

I would hope so too.

> Anyhow, I 100% disagree with you that this is 'a farce'.
> I think it's been useful, I think we have gotten:
> 
> * More information on interacting with discussion via email and if it
> will meet the needs of existing devel folks.
> * A sense of people who will probibly not want to participate at all,
> even via an email interface.
> * Some more use cases mailing lists provide that we should consider a
> way to provide if we move more things to discussion (example, I think
> some kind of better/easier public archive for drive by contributors and
> those that need to look back in history would be good)
> * Some suggestions for improvements we can ask discourse folks to make
> to make more people happy.
> 
> The next steps here would be for Matthew to ask fesco about moving
> changes discussions over to discuss and them to vote/consider that.
> After that, I hope we can fix some of the issues identified here before
> we do anything further to move more discussions over there.

Do you not see my point here? You have gotten a sizable amount of feedback 
pointing out showstoppers that make Discourse anywhere from impractical to 
unusable for several existing contributors, many of which are by design and 
will never be fixed, or at least require a lot of coding that nobody is 
signing up for (e.g., an NNTP gateway, plus, that will also suffer from some 
of the core limitations of the e-mail notification system, e.g., not picking 
up edits (unless maybe if the gateway "cancels" the post and resends the 
edited version? But NNTP post cancellation is not universally supported)). 
Yet, you are still set on pushing this change forward and already discussing 
the next steps (FESCo vote, "fix[ing] some of the issues" (but you will 
never be able to fix all of them because several are by design), 
deployment). That, in my view, makes the RFC thread a farce, because the 
option that ought to be the default (keep the status quo) appears to not 
even be under discussion.

> I'll note that we just released Fedora 38... and the users mailing list
> has had a increase in posts. It had like 60-70 in the last week.
> The askfedora category in discussion had more than that overnight last
> night. It's pretty dramatic. Granted this could be due to us advertising
> that as the way to get help, and users asking questions aren't the same
> as developers, but still... It's a LOT more interaction.

It is certainly both: end users (as opposed to developers) are used to web 
forums, and of course if you link to the forum everywhere and the mailing 
list is hidden behind several clicks and has a more complicated signup 
process, people will choose the forum.

Kevin Kofler
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Re: It’s time to transform the Fedora devel list into something new

[Kevin Kofler via devel]

Kevin Fenzi wrote:
> I think you are conflating contributors with "packagers".

We are talking about moving things off the devel list, which is mainly a 
packaging mailing list.

> Our discourse instance is hosted for us by discourse.
> We shouldn't have to do maint on it, but we will have to do moderation,
> etc.
> 
> They are managing it for us. We don't have to do anything except pay
> them. :)

So it is effectively not Free Software for us, given that we use it as SaaS.

Kevin Kofler
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Re: It’s time to transform the Fedora devel list into something new

[Solomon Peachy via devel]

On Thu, Apr 27, 2023 at 10:47:15AM -0700, Kevin Fenzi wrote:
> Our discourse instance is hosted for us by discourse.
> We shouldn't have to do maint on it, but we will have to do moderation,
> etc. 

So... if maintaining discourse is too much overhead but it's okay to pay 
someone else to handle, why can't that be done for our mailing list 
infrastructure too?  Even if that service offering is proprietary?
(hosted enterprise gitlab, anyone?)

And, for that matter, what of the other services currently 
owned/hosted/maintained under the RH/Fedora roof?  (For example, we're 
going to be having this conversation again in the not-so-distant future 
once RH finishes switching over to Jira and stops funding our Bugzilla 
instance's upkeep..)

 - Solomon
-- 
Solomon Peachypizza at shaftnet dot org (email)
  @pizza:shaftnet dot org   (matrix)
Dowling Park, FL  speachy (libra.chat)


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Re: It’s time to transform the Fedora devel list into something new

[Richard W.M. Jones]

[long discussion elided]

It has to be said I'm very much agreeing with Kevin Kofler on this.

Rich.

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Re: It’s time to transform the Fedora devel list into something new

[Kevin Fenzi]

Forgive me for answering 3 posts in one here...

On Thu, Apr 27, 2023 at 05:57:43AM +0200, Kevin Kofler via devel wrote:
> 
> But what if the major influx of new contributors that you proponents of this 
> proposal are hoping for never arrives? (Something I think is quite likely to 
> happen, considering that the main barrier to entry is NOT the mailing list.) 
> Then you will have driven away existing key contributors without anyone to 
> replace them, and Fedora will be dead.

I don't see a 'we are all in on discourse, please turn off the mailing
lists' until there's a critical mass of discussion over on discourse.
Perhaps thats just me, I can't speak for the council, but if things
don't go well at some point, the lists will still be here.
> 
> Also keep in mind that experienced contributors are the only ones able to 
> work on certain complex tasks and also to mentor new contributors so that 
> they will eventually become experienced. Chase them away and all the 
> experience will be lost, no matter how many new contributors you attract.
> 
> The first priority of a project MUST ALWAYS be to keep the existing 
> contributors. Attracting new ones can only come second.

I think you are conflating contributors with "packagers".
Granted packagers are super important, but there's a ton of other
contributors out there. People writing tests, making documentation, etc.
Also, improving things here for everyone who wants to talk about
discussion doesn't mean we shouldn't try and improve other parts of
being a packager, and in fact there's things ongoing to do that.
...snip...

On Thu, Apr 27, 2023 at 10:07:42AM -0400, Solomon Peachy via devel wrote:
> On Thu, Apr 27, 2023 at 07:01:15AM -0400, Stephen Smoogen wrote:
> > breaking mail altogether. My frustration and anger comes from the fact that
> > I spent most of the last 5 years assuming that it was somebody else's
> > problem and they would take care of it so I could focus on keeping other
> > things running.
> 
> This is a very important point -- Is RH/Fedora prepared to properly 
> handle the maintainence, administrative, moderation, etc burden of 
> scaling up the Discourse instance?

Our discourse instance is hosted for us by discourse.
We shouldn't have to do maint on it, but we will have to do moderation,
etc. 

> Or will all of Fedora's customizations make it into another special 
> snowflake instance that results in very painful upgrade paths, leaving 
> it to become yet another service left to coast along under its own 
> inertia until this cycle repeats itself again?
> 
> I mean, it's all fine to say "but Discourse is actively developed" -- if 
> you never actually upgrade/update it to match upstream, it's no 
> different than the situation we have with our mailman3 today, where 
> we're literally years behind the curve.

They are managing it for us. We don't have to do anything except pay
them. :)

Also, we do have full backups of the database and assets. 
In the unlikely event that we needed to pull out our data, we could 
(all be it with some pain trying to export it into another system).

kevin


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Re: It’s time to transform the Fedora devel list into something new

[Kevin Fenzi]

On Thu, Apr 27, 2023 at 01:39:00PM +0200, Kevin Kofler via devel wrote:
> Kevin Kofler via devel wrote:
> 
> > Stephen Smoogen wrote:
> >> So let us say it is voted on and the answer is keep the mailing lists.
> >> What are the next steps to fixing the mail system which is held together
> >> by duct-tape and bailing wire?
> > [etc.]
> > 
> > Thanks for confirming that the decision was actually already made
> > elsewhere and that this whole RFC thread is just a farce. Looks like "I
> > propose" in the original post should really read as "I dictate".

I... don't understand how you reached that conclusion.

My current understanding is: 
* Matthew posted about a number of issues / concerns with mailing lists.
These concerns are completely 100% unrelated to our current list
infrastructure. If we had the very latest mailman3 from upstream running
smoothly... it would still be a mailing list and it would really have
almost all of the same concerns. 

I completely understand where smooge is coming from here.
Am I frustrated at the current state of our mailing list infrastructre?
Oh so very much.
Do I hope we can make it better?
Oh so very much.

Are mailing lists going to 'go away' soon? NO.
There's a number of things we use lists for that will be difficult to
move over to discussion, and that leads me to...

* Matthew said he was going to propose that FESCo decide if moving Changes
discussion to discuss was something they wanted to do.
I can't see how you think thats been decided?
Much less turning off mailing lists.
I personally am willing to learn and try it... but I don't even have a
good sense where the rest of FESCo is on this. 
And this is just one part of devel discussions.

Anyhow, I 100% disagree with you that this is 'a farce'. 
I think it's been useful, I think we have gotten: 

* More information on interacting with discussion via email and if it
will meet the needs of existing devel folks.
* A sense of people who will probibly not want to participate at all,
even via an email interface.
* Some more use cases mailing lists provide that we should consider a
way to provide if we move more things to discussion (example, I think
some kind of better/easier public archive for drive by contributors and
those that need to look back in history would be good)
* Some suggestions for improvements we can ask discourse folks to make
to make more people happy.

The next steps here would be for Matthew to ask fesco about moving
changes discussions over to discuss and them to vote/consider that.
After that, I hope we can fix some of the issues identified here before
we do anything further to move more discussions over there.

Does this mean that someday we might turn off mailing lists?
Sure, it could, but it could also mean things don't work out on
discussion and things never fully move to it, or move, but then move
back.

I'll note that we just released Fedora 38... and the users mailing list
has had a increase in posts. It had like 60-70 in the last week. 
The askfedora category in discussion had more than that overnight last
night. It's pretty dramatic. Granted this could be due to us advertising
that as the way to get help, and users asking questions aren't the same
as developers, but still... It's a LOT more interaction.

Anyhow, I'll stop.

kevin


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Re: It’s time to transform the Fedora devel list into something new

[stan via devel]

On Thu, 27 Apr 2023 07:01:15 -0400
Stephen Smoogen  wrote:

> I am NOT a proponent of this proposal. I don't want to go to
> Discourse. Web interfaces like that cause me cognitive pain and
> grumpiness to use longer than a few minutes. As such I know my
> involvement with Fedora will go down further.
> 
> If it comes across that I am for this change, it is because I am
> tired and frustrated. The mailman system has been running on inertia
> since at least February 2018, when the last software updates to the
> mailman software were done. Over the last 5 years, the system has
> mostly run, but in the last year has increasingly had longer and
> longer outages. My tiredness comes from spending most of my
> Thanksgiving and Winter breaks trying to find reasons and then doing
> whatever cave-man hacks I could to fix it without breaking mail
> altogether. My frustration and anger comes from the fact that I spent
> most of the last 5 years assuming that it was somebody else's problem
> and they would take care of it so I could focus on keeping other
> things running.

I know almost nothing about mail list infrastructure.

Are there other open source linux distributions using the latest
mailman?  Could their process be copied and put in as a drop in
replacement for fedora with a little tweaking?  How do they deal with
the spam problem?  I'm not asking you to do it, but you appear to be a
domain expert, so you can probably answer these questions off the top
of your head.

Some more questions.  What language is mailman written in?  What are
the major incompatibilities of the new version with the older version?
Are there more modern alternatives that are easier to set up and
maintain?

Crazy ideas.

Would it cost less resources to set up a private usenet server for
messages than to continue maintaining the mailman application?  Is
it even possible?  Could it be outsourced to one of the big usenet
providers? I doubt it would be even a dent in their capacity since they
maintain 10 years of binary usenet posts.  Could such a usenet
server be kept in sync with Discourse, and allow posts to the server to
be propagated to Discourse?  I'm thinking of some kind of automated web
application that takes each post on the usenet server and logs in to
Discourse and posts it to the appropriate place.  A user would
configure it with their credentials once, and forget it.  Sort of the
way youtube-downloader works, except opposite.  In the other direction,
there would be a web scraper that regularly scrapes posts on fedora
discourse and reposts them to the usenet server.  Again, the user
enters their credentials once, and done.

Ignore this if it seems too woo woo or irrelevant or resource intense.
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Re: It’s time to transform the Fedora devel list into something new

[Jonathan Corbet]

Kevin Kofler via devel  writes:

> Kevin Kofler via devel wrote:
>
>> Stephen Smoogen wrote:
>>> So let us say it is voted on and the answer is keep the mailing lists.
>>> What are the next steps to fixing the mail system which is held together
>>> by duct-tape and bailing wire?
>> [etc.]
>> 
>> Thanks for confirming that the decision was actually already made
>> elsewhere and that this whole RFC thread is just a farce. Looks like "I
>> propose" in the original post should really read as "I dictate".
>
> PS: The process that Stephen describes reminds me of those rent sharks that 
> deliberately let their beautiful old historical houses rot until they fall 
> apart so badly that the rent sharks are allowed to tear them down and build 
> some ugly new concrete box with unaffordable apartments in their place.

This seems ... disrespectful at best ... toward the people who put their
time into keeping the existing email setup working.  It seems like a way
to make them throw up their hands and find a more rewarding way to spend
their time, thus accelerating the demise of this mailing list.

As I've said before, I don't welcome a transition to a siloed web forum
at all.  But one should not discount the costs of keeping an independent
email system working on today's net.  It's *not* fun.

Thanks,

jon
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Re: It’s time to transform the Fedora devel list into something new

[Solomon Peachy via devel]

On Thu, Apr 27, 2023 at 07:01:15AM -0400, Stephen Smoogen wrote:
> breaking mail altogether. My frustration and anger comes from the fact that
> I spent most of the last 5 years assuming that it was somebody else's
> problem and they would take care of it so I could focus on keeping other
> things running.

This is a very important point -- Is RH/Fedora prepared to properly 
handle the maintainence, administrative, moderation, etc burden of 
scaling up the Discourse instance?

Or will all of Fedora's customizations make it into another special 
snowflake instance that results in very painful upgrade paths, leaving 
it to become yet another service left to coast along under its own 
inertia until this cycle repeats itself again?

I mean, it's all fine to say "but Discourse is actively developed" -- if 
you never actually upgrade/update it to match upstream, it's no 
different than the situation we have with our mailman3 today, where 
we're literally years behind the curve.

 - Solomon
-- 
Solomon Peachypizza at shaftnet dot org (email)
  @pizza:shaftnet dot org   (matrix)
Dowling Park, FL  speachy (libra.chat)


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Re: It’s time to transform the Fedora devel list into something new

[Nils Philippsen]

On Thu, 2023-04-20 at 14:56 -0700, Kevin Fenzi wrote:
> So, I've been using email and lists for... 25+ years now.

Same here…

> For me personally (and I think many of the other survivors you
> mention)
> we have carefully tuned filters and email clients and can read/reply
> to
> lists with ease and forums are new and anoying because you have to
> read
> them with the interface the forum has instead of your trusty mail
> client.

In contrast, I've largely given up on staying on top of mailing lists
for years now, so it’s not just an age thing (or maybe it is 樂). Even
with filters in place, the amount landing in say devel@ is just too
overwhelming for me – a mailing list is a very coarse thing and I don’t
find subject lines helpful to scan visually to trim down the deluge to
manageable levels.

> That said, for everyone except us, mail lists are much worse for all
> the
> reasons you list.
> 
> I'm willing to try to learn new tricks and move things to discourse.

I don’t know if using a forum software like Discourse could help, but I
guess there’s something to be said about finer-grained “tags” or
“topics” – if they are used properly and I don’t see us employing
librarians to ensure that . If a “change in venue” would let me stay
on top things better, I would be very happy.

Nils
-- 
Nils Philippsen / Senior Software Engineer / Red Hat
PGP fingerprint: D0C1 1576 CDA6 5B6E BBAE 95B2 7D53 7FCA E9F6 395D
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Re: It’s time to transform the Fedora devel list into something new

[Kevin Kofler via devel]

Kevin Kofler via devel wrote:

> Stephen Smoogen wrote:
>> So let us say it is voted on and the answer is keep the mailing lists.
>> What are the next steps to fixing the mail system which is held together
>> by duct-tape and bailing wire?
> [etc.]
> 
> Thanks for confirming that the decision was actually already made
> elsewhere and that this whole RFC thread is just a farce. Looks like "I
> propose" in the original post should really read as "I dictate".

PS: The process that Stephen describes reminds me of those rent sharks that 
deliberately let their beautiful old historical houses rot until they fall 
apart so badly that the rent sharks are allowed to tear them down and build 
some ugly new concrete box with unaffordable apartments in their place.

Kevin Kofler
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Re: It’s time to transform the Fedora devel list into something new

[Stephen Smoogen]

On Wed, 26 Apr 2023 at 23:58, Kevin Kofler via devel <
devel@lists.fedoraproject.org> wrote:

> Stephen Smoogen wrote:
> > I may be in that list of toning down, but that is OK. Look it's really
> > time for new people to come in and break things. It is the only way they
> > really learn if something is something that should be really avoided or
> > was a taboo we had from the 1990's which we can't see as cargo culting
> > anymore.
> >
> > Maybe a bunch of packages will be dropped and Fedora will become
> 'useless'
> > to some of us older contributors. This isn't the first time that has
> > happened with the distribution (we saw large drop-offs after we stopped
> > Xen and when we changed desktops to GNOME3.) and if the distribution is
> to
> > last as an institution, it won't be the last. We who aren't happy with it
> > can either make do with something else, adapt, or finally retire to grow
> > potatoes like all the programmers I knew from the 1980s who had gotten
> > tired of all the changes over the years.
>
> But what if the major influx of new contributors that you proponents of
> this


s/you/the/;

I am NOT a proponent of this proposal. I don't want to go to Discourse. Web
interfaces like that cause me cognitive pain and grumpiness to use longer
than a few minutes. As such I know my involvement with Fedora will go down
further.

If it comes across that I am for this change, it is because I am tired and
frustrated. The mailman system has been running on inertia since at least
February 2018, when the last software updates to the mailman software were
done. Over the last 5 years, the system has mostly run, but in the last
year has increasingly had longer and longer outages. My tiredness comes
from spending most of my Thanksgiving and Winter breaks trying to find
reasons and then doing whatever cave-man hacks I could to fix it without
breaking mail altogether. My frustration and anger comes from the fact that
I spent most of the last 5 years assuming that it was somebody else's
problem and they would take care of it so I could focus on keeping other
things running.

-- 
Stephen Smoogen, Red Hat Automotive
Let us be kind to one another, for most of us are fighting a hard battle.
-- Ian MacClaren
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Re: It’s time to transform the Fedora devel list into something new

[Zbigniew Jędrzejewski-Szmek]

On Wed, Apr 26, 2023 at 10:28:41AM -0400, Matthew Miller wrote:
> On Tue, Apr 25, 2023 at 03:33:28PM -0400, Solomon Peachy via devel wrote:
> > Honestly, if a "how to configure discourse to mimic the MUA-managed 
> > mailing list experience (ie not having to log into a web site after the 
> > initial configuration)" document is produced, that's probaby sufficient 
> > to overcome most of these objections, because then the setup cost is 
> > one-off, and the ongoing "interact with Fedora-devel" cost won't be any 
> > greater than it already is.  (It's not the setup cost that's a problem, 
> > it's the per-transaction/interaction cost, which is currently _higher_)
> 
> I've written this:
> 
> https://discussion.fedoraproject.org/t/guide-to-interacting-with-this-site-by-email/25960
> 
> and I'd love feedback on it.

I turned on the full email notications for "Project discussion" to get a
representative sample. After two days, I would say that those notifications are
not perfect, e.g. the quoting is off for no good reason [1], but in general OK.
The text is readable and would work okayish to just follow the discussions.
In particular, replies to replies seems to be threaded correctly, so I see a
little tree in mutt.
(In some previous comments on this thread, people who passively follow
fedora-devel were mentioned. I think this answers this particular concern.)

Personally, I expect this would be similar to how I interact with github: I get
notifications by email for various activities, and either delete them or do
short replies using email, but for "bigger" interactions I click on one of the
links to go the web forum. The email workflow could be made better, github
suffers from the same gratuitous bad plain text formatting, but practically
there are limits: a multi-page diff cannot be displayed in the plain-text email
anyway, so some interaction through the browser would be needed anyway.

Actually, I think the metadata that discourse sends is already better than what
github does. And the formatting is also better. If [1] is fixed, I think it
would rate as "good". The threading is definitely better in discourse than in
github, because the latter always does a flat list of replies.

[1] 
https://meta.discourse.org/t/format-quotes-in-plain-text-e-mail-correctly/262814

Zbyszek
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Re: It’s time to transform the Fedora devel list into something new

[Kevin Kofler via devel]

Adam Williamson wrote:
> A poll like this would have an inherent problem: it's ineffective to
> have *only* the people who are already in a place vote on whether a
> measure to get new people into the place is a good idea.

Yet this approach is working fine for, e.g., Debian.

> This is the same as the NIMBY problem in municipal politics: if you
> give the residents of any area too much say over development in that
> area, they will always tend to oppose it on the grounds that it's bad
> for *them*. They have no inherent motivation to consider the interests
> of other people who might want to live or work in the area, but who
> cannot.

But the local residents are often precious allies in fighting things such as 
new highways, construction projects destroying fertile soil, etc. that make 
things worse for everyone by: accelerating the climate crisis, causing 
pollution, eating up soil needed for agriculture, etc. So guess what, I 
often find myself supporting this kind of local initiatives from the other 
end of the city. Would you be happy if your city builds a huge highway right 
through your previously quiet neighborhood? Would you find that fair?

Kevin Kofler
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Re: It’s time to transform the Fedora devel list into something new

[Kevin Kofler via devel]

Stephen Smoogen wrote:
> So let us say it is voted on and the answer is keep the mailing lists.
> What are the next steps to fixing the mail system which is held together
> by duct-tape and bailing wire?
[etc.]

Thanks for confirming that the decision was actually already made elsewhere 
and that this whole RFC thread is just a farce. Looks like "I propose" in 
the original post should really read as "I dictate".

Kevin Kofler
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Re: It’s time to transform the Fedora devel list into something new

[Kevin Kofler via devel]

Stephen Smoogen wrote:
> I may be in that list of toning down, but that is OK. Look it's really
> time for new people to come in and break things. It is the only way they
> really learn if something is something that should be really avoided or
> was a taboo we had from the 1990's which we can't see as cargo culting
> anymore.
> 
> Maybe a bunch of packages will be dropped and Fedora will become 'useless'
> to some of us older contributors. This isn't the first time that has
> happened with the distribution (we saw large drop-offs after we stopped
> Xen and when we changed desktops to GNOME3.) and if the distribution is to
> last as an institution, it won't be the last. We who aren't happy with it
> can either make do with something else, adapt, or finally retire to grow
> potatoes like all the programmers I knew from the 1980s who had gotten
> tired of all the changes over the years.

But what if the major influx of new contributors that you proponents of this 
proposal are hoping for never arrives? (Something I think is quite likely to 
happen, considering that the main barrier to entry is NOT the mailing list.) 
Then you will have driven away existing key contributors without anyone to 
replace them, and Fedora will be dead.

Also keep in mind that experienced contributors are the only ones able to 
work on certain complex tasks and also to mentor new contributors so that 
they will eventually become experienced. Chase them away and all the 
experience will be lost, no matter how many new contributors you attract.

The first priority of a project MUST ALWAYS be to keep the existing 
contributors. Attracting new ones can only come second.


That said, looking at how the "feedback" to this "proposal" is being handled 
(yet again), I guess that all that is really going to change in practice is 
that instead of completely ignoring or trying to explain away all mailing 
list feedback, you folks will be completely ignoring or trying to explain 
away all Discourse feedback. How proposals are supposed to work is that 
somebody suggests something, then feedback is requested, then it is 
discussed, and only then a decision is made. But how it is actually working 
is that a small group of people decides something in a closed-door meeting, 
then calls it a "proposal", asks for "feedback" on the mailing list to give 
an illusion of transparency and democracy, but is not actually willing to 
act on the feedback (because the decision has long been made elsewhere), 
instead only trying to explain why it "does not matter".

The sad thing is that I have even seen several replies trying to explain 
away their OWN objections to the proposal, arguing that it is normal that 
they as experienced contributors are not the target user base of the 
discussion platform. But guess what, it is not (normal). This is a developer 
mailing list, experienced contributors are THE target.

Kevin Kofler
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Re: It’s time to transform the Fedora devel list into something new

[Matthew Miller]

On Thu, Apr 27, 2023 at 12:49:02AM +0200, Kevin Kofler via devel wrote:
> Matthew Miller wrote:
> > I've written this:
> > https://discussion.fedoraproject.org/t/guide-to-interacting-with-this-site-by-email/25960
> > and I'd love feedback on it.
> 
> Asking feedback from users who are not using Discourse… on Discourse (!) is 
> absurd and the best way to not get any answers. (It is like asking "Everyone 
> who does not speak English, please raise your hand!" in English.)

I'm sorry, I guess my phrasing was not clear. I would like feedback _about_
it. That feedback can be here or directly emailed to me.


-- 
Matthew Miller

Fedora Project Leader
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Re: It’s time to transform the Fedora devel list into something new

[Randy Barlow via devel]

On 4/26/23 08:42, Kevin Kofler via devel wrote:

As I see it, the main roadblocks for new packagers are:
* accepting the FPCA,
* getting sponsored,
* learning the Packaging Guidelines, and
* getting their package(s) through review,
and that last point can be a roadblock even for existing packagers (because
we do not trust even experienced provenpackagers and/or packager sponsors to
review their own packages).


I agree with Kevin on these being much larger roadblocks than e-mail vs. 
forums.


I also contribute to another distribution, and they accept pull requests 
on GitHub with the standard git Signed-Off-By tag (i.e., nothing like 
the FPCA to agree to, no sponsorship needed, really no commitment of any 
kind needed - just send a PR and wait for someone to review/merge it. 
It's super easy, barely an inconvenience!) For those who aren't keen on 
GitHub, the same distro also accepts patches to their mailing list as 
long as you do the same Signed-Off-By tag. I've found contributing there 
to be quite easy.


I harbor doubt that changing to a web forum will make a notable 
difference in technical contributions to this project (the sorts of 
things that this list is about). I don't carry that doubt about many 
parts of the Fedora community, so I mean here to focus specifically on 
what this specific list, devel, is usually about.


I do think we can do a lot to lower that barrier to entry for new comers 
regarding the things Kevin is talking about, though I suppose the FPCA 
thing can only be relaxed with lawyer permission. I think it's possible 
to mirror to GitHub and require FPCA (if we really must have it) - I've 
seen a few projects on GitHub that had a mechanism to enforce agreeing 
to a document before they would accept PRs. Loads of people have a 
GitHub account already and it would be much easier for them than having 
a FAS account (the other distro I contribute to doesn't require 
contributors to have an account, though I do).


I think reviewing code is a healthy practice. One thing I've always 
thought was a little weird is that we only require new packages to be 
reviewed, but after that the packager can do anything. I guess I've 
always assumed that this was more about getting a second person to agree 
to the license/patent implications of the package, and probably not the 
code itself (since that will change over time without further review). I 
guess if that's why it kinda makes sense.

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Re: It’s time to transform the Fedora devel list into something new

[Randy Barlow via devel]

On 4/26/23 11:25, Matthew Miller wrote:

Use j/k to scroll up and down (ah, vi, your legacy will live forever)


According to Wikipedia, it's actually the ADM-3A:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ADM-3A#Legacy

I recently learned this, and find it fascinating ☺
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Re: It’s time to transform the Fedora devel list into something new

[Kevin Kofler via devel]

Matthew Miller wrote:
> I've written this:
> 
> https://discussion.fedoraproject.org/t/guide-to-interacting-with-this-site-by-email/25960
> 
> and I'd love feedback on it.

Asking feedback from users who are not using Discourse… on Discourse (!) is 
absurd and the best way to not get any answers. (It is like asking "Everyone 
who does not speak English, please raise your hand!" in English.)

Note that we cannot use the reply by e-mail feature to answer in the thread 
because it is an already existing thread and so we will not get a 
notification to reply to if we turn on e-mail notifications now.

> Keep in mind:
> 
> * It never will be the same as mailman. There are different constraints.

And that is exactly why Discourse will by design never be a replacement for 
a mailing list.

> * Discourse developers and designers see the web interaction as primary,
>   and that isn't going to change.

And that too.

> * Dealing with email has a lot of corner cases, so there will be rough
>   edges.

And that is a logical consequence of having the web forum as the primary 
interface and mail as an afterthought rather than the opposite.

Some features such as editing posts just by design cannot work on a mailing 
list.

Kevin Kofler
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Re: It’s time to transform the Fedora devel list into something new

[Kevin Kofler via devel]

Matthew Miller wrote:
> I actually love the idea of a Discourse-to-NNTP bridge.

But is it ever going to happen? What is sure is that Discourse's e-mail 
notification system cannot be used for this, or at least it is not suitable 
for the existing e-mail to NNTP bridges. So somebody would need to write a 
dedicated bridge.

Kevin Kofler
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Re: It’s time to transform the Fedora devel list into something new

[Kevin Fenzi]

On Wed, Apr 26, 2023 at 10:51:33AM -0400, Matthew Miller wrote:
> On Sat, Apr 22, 2023 at 04:28:16PM +, Zbigniew Jędrzejewski-Szmek wrote:
> > Could we have the same graph for discourse (and Fedora telegram and Fedora
> > matrix)? It'd be interesting to see what percentage of active communicating
> > users are active on the mailing list.
> 
> I'm not sure how to get it from Matrix. We can get it from Discourse with
> some SQL queries. https://discourse.org/plugins/data-explorer.html
> 
> Once we have such a query defined, I can make it available for anyone (or
> certain groups of people) to run. (It's not generally available because you
> can query _a lot_.)

The matrix side is a lot more muddy.

I can easily get via it's api number of users with the fedora.im
homeserver. (1581). 

But that is only users using fedora.im / chat.fedoraproject.org.
There's all the other federated matrix users using whatever homeserver.

I can get events in rooms, but... we are bridging almost all our rooms
to irc, so all the irc users events show up too on the other side of the
bridge. I suppose some scripting could get all events and parse them for
fedora.im/librea.chat/other? Anyone should be able to run such a script
that can/is joined to the rooms.

From just my perception, The #fedora channel has had a lot more matrix
users than irc users of late, and it's definitely increased since matrix
was bridged in.

kevin


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Re: It’s time to transform the Fedora devel list into something new

[Kevin Fenzi]

On Tue, Apr 25, 2023 at 03:29:34PM -0400, Matthew Miller wrote:
> On Sat, Apr 22, 2023 at 03:04:26PM -0700, Kevin Fenzi wrote:
> > I have been pondering if we could perhaps setup a public-inbox read-only
> > mirror of the posts to discussion. (
> > https://public-inbox.org/README.html ). It would take a bit of work, as
> > I think we would need to make a non priv user, subscribe to everything,
> > then mangle the emails as they come to not have the reply-to or anything
> > else thats specific to the user. However, that could be a solution to
> > longer term archiving of things, another way for casual people to read
> > things and also allow a nntp frontend for the crazy nntp folks. ;) 
> > public-inbox is plain text only, so no images/html there. 
> > If there's enough interest in this I would be happy to work with folks
> > who want to set this up.
> 
> Rather than email subscription, this could be via a webhook. That payload
> includes both the html and "uncooked" message, a bunch of metadata. And it
> can trigger on post, edit, metadata change, and other things. That's
> probably a better interface than email mangling.

yeah, that would be great if it can use a webhook.

kevin


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Re: It’s time to transform the Fedora devel list into something new

[Stephen Smoogen]

On Wed, 26 Apr 2023 at 15:28, Maxwell G  wrote:

> On Wed Apr 26, 2023 at 18:04 +0200, Vitaly Zaitsev via devel wrote:
> > On 20/04/2023 23:20, Matthew Miller wrote:
> > > It’s time to transform the Fedora devel list into something new
> >
> > I think such serious questions should be put to a vote. Not a FESCo
> > vote, but a vote for all Fedora contributors (can be combined with the
> > next FESCo elections).
>
> I think having this as a "ballot referendum" of sorts is a good idea.
>
>
So let us say it is voted on and the answer is keep the mailing lists. What
are the next steps to fixing the mail system which is held together by
duct-tape and bailing wire?

It is a seriously large task to get done with everything from someone
getting all the packages back into Fedora, architecting how email should
flow, getting a documented system and tooling, then dumping the current
system, fixing the schema changes, importing the system into a new mail
system, and doing that 6 or 7 times to get it actually working. It is a set
of tasks needing senior programmers, some DBA time, and senior system
administration. It will take about 3 to 6 months of dedicated work to get
done. If done on volunteer time, I would put it at 12 months. After that it
needs a regular redo and cleanup of code or we will be back where we are
currently very fast.

Where we are currently is a system running on old dead code, can't be
reinstalled, with a possibly slightly corrupted disk partition (though I
think I fixed all of the items) and needing to be coddled regularly to keep
going. It has hundreds of thousands of 'held' dead spam messages, similar
number of bounces for dead accounts (mailman3 did not implement
auto-unsubscribe til after the version we are running) and other oddities.

Or the infrastructure team can work on keeping the build system running
which is also fairly touchy with daily restarts, random reboots, etc. That
is also more than a full-time job for both the volunteers and dedicated
people.

Look I am not wanting to move to discourse, but voting is not going to fix
anything.


> --
> Maxwell G (@gotmax23)
> Pronouns: He/They
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Let us be kind to one another, for most of us are fighting a hard battle.
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Re: It’s time to transform the Fedora devel list into something new

[Adam Williamson]

On Wed, 2023-04-26 at 19:27 +, Maxwell G wrote:
> On Wed Apr 26, 2023 at 18:04 +0200, Vitaly Zaitsev via devel wrote:
> > On 20/04/2023 23:20, Matthew Miller wrote:
> > > It’s time to transform the Fedora devel list into something new
> > 
> > I think such serious questions should be put to a vote. Not a FESCo 
> > vote, but a vote for all Fedora contributors (can be combined with the 
> > next FESCo elections).
> 
> I think having this as a "ballot referendum" of sorts is a good idea.

A poll like this would have an inherent problem: it's ineffective to
have *only* the people who are already in a place vote on whether a
measure to get new people into the place is a good idea.

This is the same as the NIMBY problem in municipal politics: if you
give the residents of any area too much say over development in that
area, they will always tend to oppose it on the grounds that it's bad
for *them*. They have no inherent motivation to consider the interests
of other people who might want to live or work in the area, but who
cannot.
-- 
Adam Williamson (he/him/his)
Fedora QA
Fedora Chat: @adamwill:fedora.im | Mastodon: @ad...@fosstodon.org
https://www.happyassassin.net



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Re: It’s time to transform the Fedora devel list into something new

[Maxwell G]

On Wed Apr 26, 2023 at 18:04 +0200, Vitaly Zaitsev via devel wrote:
> On 20/04/2023 23:20, Matthew Miller wrote:
> > It’s time to transform the Fedora devel list into something new
>
> I think such serious questions should be put to a vote. Not a FESCo 
> vote, but a vote for all Fedora contributors (can be combined with the 
> next FESCo elections).

I think having this as a "ballot referendum" of sorts is a good idea.

--
Maxwell G (@gotmax23)
Pronouns: He/They
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Re: It’s time to transform the Fedora devel list into something new

[Josh Boyer]

On Wed, Apr 26, 2023 at 8:43 AM Kevin Kofler via devel
 wrote:
>
> Josh Boyer wrote:
> > Ah.  May or may not.  That gives me hope at least.
>
> Well, considering that we have hundreds of existing contributors, who all
> may or may not be willing to adapt to a platform that is clearly not
> designed for them (Discourse is very strongly newbie-centric, see the
> "achievements" and all the other hand-holding), I think it is safe to assume
> that several important contributors WILL leave, tone down their
> participation, and/or miss some important communication (leading to breakage
> in the distribution, e.g., broken dependencies making it into Rawhide) if
> Fedora makes the switch.
>
> > I don't think it's a double standard.  I think people that already
> > know how Fedora development and contribution works are inherently in a
> > better position to adapt to something new, whereas net-new
> > contributors are unlikely to even start based on an email driven
> > practice.
>
> And as I already answered, I think this is completely backwards. If you want
> to newly join a project, you learn their way to do things and adapt to it.
> If, on the other hand, you are already involved in a project and have
> workflows that work for you, any forced change to something perceived as a
> regression will annoy you and make you want to leave.

I think you and I fundamentally disagree on this and that's OK.  I'm
not trying to convince you.  I was trying to understand your stance on
why you'd potentially leave and express the reasons why I think it's
worth it.

We'll have to end our conversation here, because we've both stated
clearly where we stand and I respect that you and I are simply not
aligned.  Thank you for your thoughts.

josh
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Re: It’s time to transform the Fedora devel list into something new

[Jóhann B . Guðmundsson]

On 4/26/23 16:04, Vitaly Zaitsev via devel wrote:

On 20/04/2023 23:20, Matthew Miller wrote:

It’s time to transform the Fedora devel list into something new


I think such serious questions should be put to a vote. Not a FESCo 
vote, but a vote for all Fedora contributors (can be combined with the 
next FESCo elections).



Well it's long overdue that the community in whole cant veto via vote 
poor decision making by the appointed and elected official of the 
project including it's leader...



JBG
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Re: It’s time to transform the Fedora devel list into something new

[Vitaly Zaitsev via devel]

On 20/04/2023 23:20, Matthew Miller wrote:

It’s time to transform the Fedora devel list into something new


I think such serious questions should be put to a vote. Not a FESCo 
vote, but a vote for all Fedora contributors (can be combined with the 
next FESCo elections).


--
Sincerely,
  Vitaly Zaitsev (vit...@easycoding.org)
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Re: It’s time to transform the Fedora devel list into something new

[Matthew Miller]

On Wed, Apr 26, 2023 at 10:20:11AM -0500, Chris Adams wrote:
> So... this brings up something about this whole thread that I've avoided
> but think does matter: I understand that you are the Fedora Project
> Leader, but it seems like a lot of this is being done based on your
> personal decisions.  I believe that you are doing what you think is best
> for the project (NOT questioning your motives, experience, etc.), but is
> all of this entirely in scope for the project leader to decide on their
> own?

I think there's two mixed things here.

For the forum itself, I've been acting as admin, and I admit I'm excited
about it. But I haven't been making most decisions alone — I usually post in
the public Site Help & Feedback forum for discussion first. (See these
topics for some big examples:
https://discussion.fedoraproject.org/t/considering-a-general-reorganization-of-this-site/34174
https://discussion.fedoraproject.org/t/considering-a-merge-of-ask-fedora-into-discussion-fedoraproject-org/68177)
)
But in the future, and probably not the very far future, we should have a 
formal team
around this.

Second, there's the decision about what to do with devel list, or mailing
lists overall. As outlined in the first post, I'm not making that decision
alone. We've dicussed it in the Fedora Council, and we're having this
discussion here, and the first step is the intended experiment with the
Change process -- which is a FESCo decision.


> You believe that the lists are outdated/blocking new contributors, but
> where is the evidence to support that (and that a web forum will be
> better), and who else agreed to such a change?  You turned off mailing
> list mode because you believe it isn't good, but who else had input?

I feel like this is actually an example of the problem with so-called
"mailing list mode". Out of context, that sounds like I have disabled a mode
that makes Discourse behave more like a mailing list. (I mean, right?) But
that's not what it does, as I've noted several places already here. So when
upstream disabled the setting by default
(https://meta.discourse.org/t/2-7-0-beta5-improved-invites-auto-tag-and-auto-replace-watched-words-pm-bulk-operations-and-more/182096)
it made sense to me to me to just follow that change.

> I'm just a little concerned that because you don't like mailing lists,
> Fedora must migrate away, and to something where you'll be making more
> individual decisions.

Honestly, it's just plain not sustainable for me to keep doing that, whether
or not it's good or bad. :)

-- 
Matthew Miller

Fedora Project Leader
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Re: It’s time to transform the Fedora devel list into something new

[Matthew Miller]

On Wed, Apr 26, 2023 at 04:34:22AM +0200, Kevin Kofler via devel wrote:
> And in particular, NNTP is not supported at all, and the way the e-mail 
> notifications work does not lend itself to NNTP gatewaying over Gmane.

Well, email (and Mailman3 and Hyperkitty and Postorious) do not support
NNTP. Gmane is a software that specifically exists to bridge email to NNTP.

I actually love the idea of a Discourse-to-NNTP bridge.

-- 
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Fedora Project Leader
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Re: It’s time to transform the Fedora devel list into something new

[Matthew Miller]

On Tue, Apr 25, 2023 at 12:38:46PM +0200, Dominik 'Rathann' Mierzejewski wrote:
> > In some instances at least, you can select the text in the fragment you
> > are replying to, and a quote button will appear.  I at least found that
> > quite discoverable.
> 
> You have to use your mouse to do it, which is too disrupting for me.

There are keybindings!

Use j/k to scroll up and down (ah, vi, your legacy will live forever) and q
to start a reply to that post with the selected post marked as q quote, and
then trim in the editor.

If you have your browser's arrow-key control feature turned on (F7 in
Firefox), you can use this in combination — j/k to move between posts, and
then arrow keys over to shift-arrow select the part you want, and then again
q to quote (or if it is a post you have permission to edit — your own, or a
wiki post, or you're a mod — e to edit).


-- 
Matthew Miller

Fedora Project Leader
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Re: It’s time to transform the Fedora devel list into something new

[Chris Adams]

Once upon a time, Matthew Miller  said:
> I turned off the mailing list mode on purpose.

So... this brings up something about this whole thread that I've avoided
but think does matter: I understand that you are the Fedora Project
Leader, but it seems like a lot of this is being done based on your
personal decisions.  I believe that you are doing what you think is best
for the project (NOT questioning your motives, experience, etc.), but is
all of this entirely in scope for the project leader to decide on their
own?

You believe that the lists are outdated/blocking new contributors, but
where is the evidence to support that (and that a web forum will be
better), and who else agreed to such a change?  You turned off mailing
list mode because you believe it isn't good, but who else had input?

I'm just a little concerned that because you don't like mailing lists,
Fedora must migrate away, and to something where you'll be making more
individual decisions.
-- 
Chris Adams 
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Re: It’s time to transform the Fedora devel list into something new

[Matthew Miller]

On Tue, Apr 25, 2023 at 10:49:03AM +0200, Florian Weimer wrote:
> Have you considered outsourcing email (list) operations instead?

We looked into a hosted Pony Mail a while ago. But (leaving aside "I don't
think that solves everything I want to address"), hosted solutions are
difficult because if Red Hat is paying for it, there is an
enterprise-contract process to go through, and generally a lot of vendor
scrutiny and demands -- much of which is good and some of which I feel is
overkill. It took over a year each to get Element (Matrix) and CDCK (the
Discourse company) through the process -- and those companies had already
dealt with enterprise contracts. I think it's unlikely we'll find a good
open source option.

> Discourse needs to solve the same issues to keep email notifications
> working.  Do we know how well they are doing?  Discourse seems to have
> stopped offering mailing list mode in the Fedora instance.  I wonder
> whether this is related.

They're ahead of us, I think. I was recently talking to them about the
possibility of using @fedoraproject.org sender / inbound addresses, and got
an overview of their infrastructure and it's enough that it made me bookmark
the whole thing for when I have more time. :)

I turned off the mailing list mode on purpose. There's a subthread somewhere
here about it. I feel like it's a trap -- it does not really enable anything
special, but instead is "subscribe to ALL LISTS". That's not the best option
for most people -- even people who are looking for mailing-list behavior.
(It might made sense for smaller forums where the entire forum is the
equivalent of one list.)

If there's enough demand, we can put it back. As mentioned in the other
subthread, if so I'll probably rename publicly-facing option to something
more descriptive.

-- 
Matthew Miller

Fedora Project Leader
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Re: It’s time to transform the Fedora devel list into something new

[Matthew Miller]

On Sat, Apr 22, 2023 at 04:28:16PM +, Zbigniew Jędrzejewski-Szmek wrote:
> Could we have the same graph for discourse (and Fedora telegram and Fedora
> matrix)? It'd be interesting to see what percentage of active communicating
> users are active on the mailing list.

I'm not sure how to get it from Matrix. We can get it from Discourse with
some SQL queries. https://discourse.org/plugins/data-explorer.html

Once we have such a query defined, I can make it available for anyone (or
certain groups of people) to run. (It's not generally available because you
can query _a lot_.)


-- 
Matthew Miller

Fedora Project Leader
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Re: It’s time to transform the Fedora devel list into something new

[Matthew Miller]

On Sun, Apr 23, 2023 at 06:11:45PM +, Randy Barlow via devel wrote:
> On 4/21/23 14:05, Matthew Miller wrote:
> >Accessiblity is important to Fedora, and I take this seriously. For
> >Discourse, hit the ? key to bring up the page describing keyboard shortcuts.
> 
> One thing I don't care for when it comes to web apps and keyboard
> shortcuts is that they are non-standard. When I can process
> communications in my mail client, all mail uses the same keyboard
> shortcuts, no matter which site it came from. With web apps, every
> web app has it's own keyboard shortcuts, which makes learning them
> all difficult.

Yeah, that can be frustrating. But in this case at least, at least it'll be
the same keys across various Discourse sites, and as noted it's pretty
clearly emerging as the most common tool for open source discussion forums.

I promise not to re-configure the keybindings for our site. :)



-- 
Matthew Miller

Fedora Project Leader
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Re: It’s time to transform the Fedora devel list into something new

[Matthew Miller]

On Tue, Apr 25, 2023 at 03:33:28PM -0400, Solomon Peachy via devel wrote:
> Honestly, if a "how to configure discourse to mimic the MUA-managed 
> mailing list experience (ie not having to log into a web site after the 
> initial configuration)" document is produced, that's probaby sufficient 
> to overcome most of these objections, because then the setup cost is 
> one-off, and the ongoing "interact with Fedora-devel" cost won't be any 
> greater than it already is.  (It's not the setup cost that's a problem, 
> it's the per-transaction/interaction cost, which is currently _higher_)

I've written this:

https://discussion.fedoraproject.org/t/guide-to-interacting-with-this-site-by-email/25960

and I'd love feedback on it.

Keep in mind:

* It never will be the same as mailman. There are different constraints.

* Discourse developers and designers see the web interaction as primary, and
  that isn't going to change.

* Dealing with email has a lot of corner cases, so there will be rough
  edges.


-- 
Matthew Miller

Fedora Project Leader
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Re: It’s time to transform the Fedora devel list into something new

[Stephen Smoogen]

On Wed, 26 Apr 2023 at 08:44, Kevin Kofler via devel <
devel@lists.fedoraproject.org> wrote:

> Josh Boyer wrote:
> > Ah.  May or may not.  That gives me hope at least.
>
> Well, considering that we have hundreds of existing contributors, who all
> may or may not be willing to adapt to a platform that is clearly not
> designed for them (Discourse is very strongly newbie-centric, see the
> "achievements" and all the other hand-holding), I think it is safe to
> assume
> that several important contributors WILL leave, tone down their
> participation, and/or miss some important communication (leading to
> breakage
> in the distribution, e.g., broken dependencies making it into Rawhide) if
> Fedora makes the switch.
>
>
I may be in that list of toning down, but that is OK. Look it's really time
for new people to come in and break things. It is the only way they really
learn if something is something that should be really avoided or was a
taboo we had from the 1990's which we can't see as cargo culting anymore.

Maybe a bunch of packages will be dropped and Fedora will become 'useless'
to some of us older contributors. This isn't the first time that has
happened with the distribution (we saw large drop-offs after we stopped Xen
and when we changed desktops to GNOME3.) and if the distribution is to last
as an institution, it won't be the last. We who aren't happy with it can
either make do with something else, adapt, or finally retire to grow
potatoes like all the programmers I knew from the 1980s who had gotten
tired of all the changes over the years.

Normally this is where I would clip the rest of the message, but I want to
say something about a later section, so please scroll.


>
>
> > It's a barrier to entry problem.  If we, as the experienced and capable
> > contributor base, can adapt to something and lower the barrier to entry
> > then it benefits us all.
>
> Again, I do not see the communication platform as the main barrier to
> entry
> for Fedora at all. Where is the evidence for that claim?
>
> As I see it, the main roadblocks for new packagers are:
> * accepting the FPCA,
> * getting sponsored,
> * learning the Packaging Guidelines, and
> * getting their package(s) through review,
> and that last point can be a roadblock even for existing packagers
> (because
> we do not trust even experienced provenpackagers and/or packager sponsors
> to
> review their own packages).
>
> Those points are all there for a reason (the FPCA for legal coverage, the
> sponsorship process so new contributors are mentored and their
> trustfulness
> verified, the Packaging Guidelines to ensure a certain package quality for
> our end users, and the review process to ensure that the Packaging
> Guidelines are actually followed and as another check that nothing
> malicious
> sneaks in), but they are the barrier to entry, not the communication
> platform.
>
>
I want to say that I agree with Kevin Kofler on this. We have a lot of
other barriers for entry which I have found to be higher on getting new
contributors into the distribution. Unless we have some field in the
discussion site with interested and energized people who can help mentor
future packagers.. we aren't addressing the real problem. That said, this
discussion hasn't been about how to fix that problem either here OR the
forum.

-- 
Stephen Smoogen, Red Hat Automotive
Let us be kind to one another, for most of us are fighting a hard battle.
-- Ian MacClaren
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Re: It’s time to transform the Fedora devel list into something new

[Solomon Peachy via devel]

On Wed, Apr 26, 2023 at 02:42:56PM +0200, Kevin Kofler via devel wrote:
> And as I already answered, I think this is completely backwards. If you want 
> to newly join a project, you learn their way to do things and adapt to it. 
> If, on the other hand, you are already involved in a project and have 
> workflows that work for you, any forced change to something perceived as a 
> regression will annoy you and make you want to leave.

In nearly all professions, "mastery of the tools of the trade" is 
considered to be an important milestone, necessary if you're wanting to 
excel in that endeavor. Unfortunately, for some reason, in this 
profession, "tool mastery" is actively looked down upon.  Nevermind that 
this mastery (which includes continuing to adapt, refine, and improve 
those tools) is the basis of the "10x developer" that so many claim to 
want.

> As I see it, the main roadblocks for new packagers are:

I think one of the legitimate points Matthew (and others) are making is 
that "contributor != packager"

> * accepting the FPCA,
> * getting sponsored,

FWIW I never made it past this point. But at the same time I've not 
really needed to.

> * learning the Packaging Guidelines, and
> * getting their package(s) through review,

But this is a _very_ high hurdle, as there's a _ton_ of policy and 
fedora-specific process that has nothing to do with email or forums or 
any "common" communication platform that would-be contributors would 
ever be expected to be familiar with.

But as I already mentioned, this only applies to packagers; there are 
many other avenues for contributors.  That said, are those other avenues 
relevant for this particular mailing list?

> Guidelines are actually followed and as another check that nothing malicious 
> sneaks in), but they are the barrier to entry, not the communication 
> platform.

I completely agree, at least on the "packagers" side. I don't know what 
barriers non-packaging contributors face, but I presume each 
sub-category has its own barriers to entry.

 - Solomon
-- 
Solomon Peachypizza at shaftnet dot org (email)
  @pizza:shaftnet dot org   (matrix)
Dowling Park, FL  speachy (libra.chat)


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Re: It’s time to transform the Fedora devel list into something new

[Miroslav Suchý]

Dne 20. 04. 23 v 23:20 Matthew Miller napsal(a):

I know this is a big change, but, hear me out…


It is a big change. But I am +1

So far I was able to configure notification in Discourse to send me email and I track new in mail client. The Discourse 
can filter lots of emails that are +1 or -1. And at the same time give you option to provide such feedback in cases you 
would not submit it as an email.


Miroslav
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Re: It’s time to transform the Fedora devel list into something new

[Kevin Kofler via devel]

Josh Boyer wrote:
> Ah.  May or may not.  That gives me hope at least.

Well, considering that we have hundreds of existing contributors, who all 
may or may not be willing to adapt to a platform that is clearly not 
designed for them (Discourse is very strongly newbie-centric, see the 
"achievements" and all the other hand-holding), I think it is safe to assume 
that several important contributors WILL leave, tone down their 
participation, and/or miss some important communication (leading to breakage 
in the distribution, e.g., broken dependencies making it into Rawhide) if 
Fedora makes the switch.

> I don't think it's a double standard.  I think people that already
> know how Fedora development and contribution works are inherently in a
> better position to adapt to something new, whereas net-new
> contributors are unlikely to even start based on an email driven
> practice.

And as I already answered, I think this is completely backwards. If you want 
to newly join a project, you learn their way to do things and adapt to it. 
If, on the other hand, you are already involved in a project and have 
workflows that work for you, any forced change to something perceived as a 
regression will annoy you and make you want to leave.

> It's a barrier to entry problem.  If we, as the experienced and capable
> contributor base, can adapt to something and lower the barrier to entry
> then it benefits us all.

Again, I do not see the communication platform as the main barrier to entry 
for Fedora at all. Where is the evidence for that claim?

As I see it, the main roadblocks for new packagers are:
* accepting the FPCA,
* getting sponsored,
* learning the Packaging Guidelines, and
* getting their package(s) through review,
and that last point can be a roadblock even for existing packagers (because 
we do not trust even experienced provenpackagers and/or packager sponsors to 
review their own packages).

Those points are all there for a reason (the FPCA for legal coverage, the 
sponsorship process so new contributors are mentored and their trustfulness 
verified, the Packaging Guidelines to ensure a certain package quality for 
our end users, and the review process to ensure that the Packaging 
Guidelines are actually followed and as another check that nothing malicious 
sneaks in), but they are the barrier to entry, not the communication 
platform.

> To be clear, I do not like forums.  Discourse is perhaps the best
> forum platform I've used, but that doesn't mean I like it.

I find Discourse to actually be one of the worst forum platforms I have 
used, if not the worst. All the *BB ones out there are much better due to 
using less (to no) AJAX and less annoying hand-holding. 

> What I dislike more than forum software is knowing we're leaving people
> that could do great things and spread more awareness of Fedora simply
> because we've ossified on a communication platform that is hard to
> discover and consume.

Again, this assumes that this is what is holding back new contributors, for 
which I have seen no evidence whatsoever.

Kevin Kofler
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Re: It’s time to transform the Fedora devel list into something new

[Josh Boyer]

On Tue, Apr 25, 2023 at 10:42 PM Kevin Kofler via devel
 wrote:
>
> Josh Boyer wrote:
> > I want to make sure I understand that statement.  You're saying you
> > will actively walk away from Fedora because you would have to change
> > the manner in which you discuss things?
>
> I am saying I and many other existing contributors may or may not walk away
> from Fedora entirely, and even if not, may reduce our interaction with
> Fedora, due to being forced to use a discussion tool that does not support
> our workflows.

Ah.  May or may not.  That gives me hope at least.

> Heck, it does not even work in my browser (Falkon) without ugly workarounds.
> (https://discuss.kde.org/t/discuss-kde-org-cannot-be-accessed-by-konqueror/548)
>
> > That's certainly a choice one could make.  Personally, I would not
> > prioritize keeping my bespoke email setup intact over working with a
> > community on a project I care about.  If there's even a remote
> > possibility moving to Discourse will attract more contributors to
> > Fedora then I'd happily learn how to deal with it.  Change is
> > difficult, but in the end it's something we're all capable of.
>
> I do not understand this double standard: You and several others are
> expecting new contributors to walk away from Fedora due to the manner in
> which we discuss things, but in the same time act surprised when warned that
> existing contributors are likely to do exactly that. In fact, we have much
> more reason to do so because the new workflow is a regression, and forcing
> it on us over our objections actively tells us we are no longer welcome.

I don't think it's a double standard.  I think people that already
know how Fedora development and contribution works are inherently in a
better position to adapt to something new, whereas net-new
contributors are unlikely to even start based on an email driven
practice.  It's a barrier to entry problem.  If we, as the experienced
and capable contributor base, can adapt to something and lower the
barrier to entry then it benefits us all.

To be clear, I do not like forums.  Discourse is perhaps the best
forum platform I've used, but that doesn't mean I like it.  What I
dislike more than forum software is knowing we're leaving people that
could do great things and spread more awareness of Fedora simply
because we've ossified on a communication platform that is hard to
discover and consume.

josh
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Re: It’s time to transform the Fedora devel list into something new

[Sandro]

On 25-04-2023 18:58, Kevin Fenzi wrote:

As you can see, it doesn't take any great inventions to do this. The
email standards already contain the necessary features. They just need
to be implemented, if the Discourse developers are serious about
supporting interaction by email.

well, as you well know, coming up with ideas on how things could work is
often the easy part.  I have no idea how willing they would be to work
on this... but you can ask onhttps://meta.discourse.org/


I put in a request for getting the plain text e-mail formatting of 
quotes fixed:


https://meta.discourse.org/t/format-quotes-in-plain-text-e-mail-correctly/262814

Feel free to chime in and/or add your own requests.

-- Sandro
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Re: It’s time to transform the Fedora devel list into something new

[Kevin Kofler via devel]

Matthew Miller wrote:

> On Tue, Apr 25, 2023 at 07:00:20PM +0200, Fabio Valentini wrote:
>> - Change Proposals could be *announced* on the devel list, but
>> discussion could happen in a linked topic on Discourse
> 
> This is basically my proposal, although I suggest devel-announce rather
> than devel-list, because otherwise the result is two separate discussions.

devel-announce is forwarded to devel, so this does not prevent the two 
separate discussions (mailing list vs. Discourse). Unless you stop this 
forwarding, which would also be a regression because it means we would now 
have to watch yet another mailing list.

Kevin Kofler
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Re: It’s time to transform the Fedora devel list into something new

[Kevin Kofler via devel]

Josh Boyer wrote:
> I want to make sure I understand that statement.  You're saying you
> will actively walk away from Fedora because you would have to change
> the manner in which you discuss things?

I am saying I and many other existing contributors may or may not walk away 
from Fedora entirely, and even if not, may reduce our interaction with 
Fedora, due to being forced to use a discussion tool that does not support 
our workflows.

Heck, it does not even work in my browser (Falkon) without ugly workarounds. 
(https://discuss.kde.org/t/discuss-kde-org-cannot-be-accessed-by-konqueror/548)

> That's certainly a choice one could make.  Personally, I would not
> prioritize keeping my bespoke email setup intact over working with a
> community on a project I care about.  If there's even a remote
> possibility moving to Discourse will attract more contributors to
> Fedora then I'd happily learn how to deal with it.  Change is
> difficult, but in the end it's something we're all capable of.

I do not understand this double standard: You and several others are 
expecting new contributors to walk away from Fedora due to the manner in 
which we discuss things, but in the same time act surprised when warned that 
existing contributors are likely to do exactly that. In fact, we have much 
more reason to do so because the new workflow is a regression, and forcing 
it on us over our objections actively tells us we are no longer welcome.

Kevin Kofler
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Re: It’s time to transform the Fedora devel list into something new

[Kevin Kofler via devel]

On 4/25/23 14:33, Solomon Peachy via devel wrote:
>> Honestly, if a "how to configure discourse to mimic the MUA-managed
>> mailing list experience (ie not having to log into a web site after the
>> initial configuration)" document is produced, that's probaby sufficient
>> to overcome most of these objections, because then the setup cost is
>> one-off, and the ongoing "interact with Fedora-devel" cost won't be any
>> greater than it already is.

As far as I can tell, it is impossible to configure Discourse to work like a 
mailing list. It is not designed for that. It is a web AJAX forum, with the 
possibility to get e-mail notifications, but the e-mail interaction is 
limited and cannot replace the AJAX UI.

And in particular, NNTP is not supported at all, and the way the e-mail 
notifications work does not lend itself to NNTP gatewaying over Gmane.

Ian Pilcher wrote:
> Only if there's a companion document on how to interact with Discourse
> over NNTP.  :-(

Exactly that.

Kevin Kofler
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Re: It’s time to transform the Fedora devel list into something new

[Matthew Miller]

On Tue, Apr 25, 2023 at 02:00:02PM +0200, Kamil Paral wrote:
> This is a part I agree with. I've been very annoyed by the gamified
> achievements, and I haven't found a way to completely shut them off.
> Fortunately they stopped appearing after some time, perhaps I earned all of
> them already. Or perhaps they were enabled on Ask, but they're not enabled
> on Discussions?
> 
> Matt, is this something configurable?

Yes, I turned them all off on Discussion. (Except the one for having 10+
accepted answers in Ask.) My intention (in very hacky prototype currently)
is to replace those all with Fedora Badges.

These will only appear for people who have enabled that (although we may
want it to default to on eventually, once Badges is in better shape). And
while I hope to have some for Discourse participation, those will be part of
the overall Fedora Project ones. (Including replacing the 10+ answers one.)

-- 
Matthew Miller

Fedora Project Leader
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Re: It’s time to transform the Fedora devel list into something new

[Matthew Miller]

On Tue, Apr 25, 2023 at 07:00:20PM +0200, Fabio Valentini wrote:
> - Change Proposals could be *announced* on the devel list, but
> discussion could happen in a linked topic on Discourse

This is basically my proposal, although I suggest devel-announce rather than
devel-list, because otherwise the result is two separate discussions.



-- 
Matthew Miller

Fedora Project Leader
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Re: It’s time to transform the Fedora devel list into something new

[Ian Pilcher]

On 4/25/23 14:33, Solomon Peachy via devel wrote:

Honestly, if a "how to configure discourse to mimic the MUA-managed
mailing list experience (ie not having to log into a web site after the
initial configuration)" document is produced, that's probaby sufficient
to overcome most of these objections, because then the setup cost is
one-off, and the ongoing "interact with Fedora-devel" cost won't be any
greater than it already is.


Only if there's a companion document on how to interact with Discourse
over NNTP.  :-(

--

Google  Where SkyNet meets Idiocracy


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Re: It’s time to transform the Fedora devel list into something new

[Matthew Miller]

On Sat, Apr 22, 2023 at 04:05:41PM +, Zbigniew Jędrzejewski-Szmek wrote:
> > > And this includes both mentoring them to be able to contribute, but also
> > accepting the fact that new people can bring new ideas, and we should
> > provide them space to work on them and not just expect them to follow and
> > do what they were told to do.
> 
> [^^ side note about the above ^^^
>  Your mail client breaks quoting: it only inserts ">" on the first
>  line, and not the later lines of the quote. This makes your mails
>  harder to read than they should be. The same is true in your other
>  mails, it's not a one-off thing.]

This is probably Gmail's web client. It does this, and other odd things that
make it very frustrating to use for anything but "top-post,
quote-everything". 

-- 
Matthew Miller

Fedora Project Leader
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Re: It’s time to transform the Fedora devel list into something new

[Solomon Peachy via devel]

On Tue, Apr 25, 2023 at 02:59:22PM -0400, Josh Boyer wrote:
> That's certainly a choice one could make.  Personally, I would not
> prioritize keeping my bespoke email setup intact over working with a
> community on a project I care about. 

My "besoke email setup" benefits *me* and my productivity/workflow far 
more than the ability to interact with Fedora.  I might add that "email" 
as a whole remains a _lot_ more important than Fedora too.

For nearly all of us, Fedora is means to an end, not the end in of 
itself.  Please keep that in mind that most of us are _not_ paid or 
otherwise compensated for our participation here, and that there are 
very real costs (if "only" time and attention) associated with this 
participating. By increasing those costs (real and perceived) many will 
reasonably determine the benefits are no longer worth the higher costs.

> If there's even a remote possibility moving to Discourse will attract 
> more contributors to Fedora then I'd happily learn how to deal with 
> it.  Change is difficult, but in the end it's something we're all 
> capable of.

What's good for "Fedora" isn't necessarily good for many (or even most) 
of the individuals that already participate.

Again, this is a matter of deciding, at the project leadership level, 
what level of effort should go into keeping more of the current 
contributors versus the possibility of attracting new ones.  As things 
stand, the leadership is tryting hard to understand the objections 
to/problems with this proposal and mitigate them "well enough"

Honestly, if a "how to configure discourse to mimic the MUA-managed 
mailing list experience (ie not having to log into a web site after the 
initial configuration)" document is produced, that's probaby sufficient 
to overcome most of these objections, because then the setup cost is 
one-off, and the ongoing "interact with Fedora-devel" cost won't be any 
greater than it already is.  (It's not the setup cost that's a problem, 
it's the per-transaction/interaction cost, which is currently _higher_)

 - Solomon
-- 
Solomon Peachypizza at shaftnet dot org (email)
  @pizza:shaftnet dot org   (matrix)
Dowling Park, FL  speachy (libra.chat)


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Re: It’s time to transform the Fedora devel list into something new

[Matthew Miller]

On Sat, Apr 22, 2023 at 03:04:26PM -0700, Kevin Fenzi wrote:
> I have been pondering if we could perhaps setup a public-inbox read-only
> mirror of the posts to discussion. (
> https://public-inbox.org/README.html ). It would take a bit of work, as
> I think we would need to make a non priv user, subscribe to everything,
> then mangle the emails as they come to not have the reply-to or anything
> else thats specific to the user. However, that could be a solution to
> longer term archiving of things, another way for casual people to read
> things and also allow a nntp frontend for the crazy nntp folks. ;) 
> public-inbox is plain text only, so no images/html there. 
> If there's enough interest in this I would be happy to work with folks
> who want to set this up.

Rather than email subscription, this could be via a webhook. That payload
includes both the html and "uncooked" message, a bunch of metadata. And it
can trigger on post, edit, metadata change, and other things. That's
probably a better interface than email mangling.



-- 
Matthew Miller

Fedora Project Leader
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Re: It’s time to transform the Fedora devel list into something new

[Matthew Miller]

On Sun, Apr 23, 2023 at 05:23:34PM +, Mattia Verga via devel wrote:
> - I'm also skeptical about having all mailing lists under one Discourse
> category (I suppose it will be "Project Discussions") and use tags to
> filter them. I think an high volume list such as devel should gone under
> it's own category. Maybe for other low volumes lists which are specific
> to groups or aspects can use the "tags" categorization.

I think the several different functions of the list belong in different
tags. What's here and what's on some other list (or already on a different
platform altogether) is largely an accident of history.

If it does seem like there's a clear set of things which could be split to a
different category, we have that option in the future. The category of a
topic is just metadata, so chagning it is fast and doesn't change URLs or
anything.



> - Another problem is that there are already too many tags available and
> the tag description is not visible in the post submit form. I think a
> new user would be confused what tag to use. I'm confused too, but that's
> probably just me...

That's useful feedback. We're working on making that better.

-- 
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Fedora Project Leader
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Re: It’s time to transform the Fedora devel list into something new

[Matthew Miller]

On Sat, Apr 22, 2023 at 05:40:41PM +, Zbigniew Jędrzejewski-Szmek wrote:
> I think this is a great place to start. If it works, wonderful. If it
> doesn't work, then we can delay/abort/redesign any later steps.

Exactly.

> 
> > Second, I think other FESCo-related conversations should move. I hope
> > this will reduce the urge to have back-and-forth exchanges in the
> > tickets. For the Fedora Council, I set up a bot which automatically
> > creates a discussion topic when a ticket is filed, leaving the ticket
> > just for votes and recording of outcome. FESCo could use something
> > similar.
> 
> Could we instead have a poll which is open only to members in a FAS
> group and tally those votes? I guess this would be useful for other
> things too. (E.g. as a replacement for blocker-review [1]).

Yes, that's possible. (The group sync stuff is almost in place -- infra SOP
docs getting finalized.)


> [1] https://pagure.io/fedora-qa/blocker-review
> > And finally… shut down the devel list itself. Perhaps at the end of
> > 2023?
> That seems way too early. Let's not plan for this until it is clear
> that we can do that without losing contributors.

Fair enough! I intend to only submit the Changes move to FESCo at this time
(or, once this discussion has settled), and the rest can come as it does. I
just wanted to also give a clear picture of what I'm aiming for right up
front.

-- 
Matthew Miller

Fedora Project Leader
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Re: It’s time to transform the Fedora devel list into something new

[Josh Boyer]

On Mon, Apr 24, 2023 at 10:21 PM Kevin Kofler via devel
 wrote:
>
> Kamil Paral wrote:
> > I've spent more than a decade perfecting my email filters and I have a
> > setup that works for me very well. I dislike certain aspects of mailing
> > lists (cross-posting, top-posting, reply-to, etc, which just can't work
> > well when everyone has to be vigilant all the time to do things right),
> > but I *like* my existing setup and processes. But that's me, us, the old
> > timers.
>
> But that is exactly why it is an absurd idea to move away from mailing
> lists. Fedora will *lose* all the existing contributors like you or me.

I want to make sure I understand that statement.  You're saying you
will actively walk away from Fedora because you would have to change
the manner in which you discuss things?

That's certainly a choice one could make.  Personally, I would not
prioritize keeping my bespoke email setup intact over working with a
community on a project I care about.  If there's even a remote
possibility moving to Discourse will attract more contributors to
Fedora then I'd happily learn how to deal with it.  Change is
difficult, but in the end it's something we're all capable of.

josh
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Re: It’s time to transform the Fedora devel list into something new

[Adam Williamson]

On Tue, 2023-04-25 at 10:42 -0700, Kevin Fenzi wrote:
> On Tue, Apr 25, 2023 at 07:25:06PM +0200, Florian Weimer wrote:
> > * Kevin Fenzi:
> > 
> > > On Tue, Apr 25, 2023 at 10:24:37AM -0500, Michael Catanzaro wrote:
> > > > On Tue, Apr 25 2023 at 11:32:14 AM +0200, Florian Weimer
> > > >  wrote:
> > > > > This option has been disabled in the Fedora instance, though.  There
> > > > > should be “Mailing list mode“ and “Enable mailing list mode” at the 
> > > > > end
> > > > > of this page:
> > > > > 
> > > > >   
> > > > > 
> > > > > But in my case at least, it's missing.
> > > > 
> > > > Seconding this question. What's up with this?
> > > > 
> > > > The mailing list mode is not amazing, but it is adequate. Without it,
> > > > participation in Fedora devel discussions will plummet. At least 
> > > > there's no
> > > > chance I'll manually browse the web forum to see what's going on.
> > > 
> > > As Matthew said in an eariler post in this very thread: 
> > > https://lists.fedoraproject.org/archives/list/devel@lists.fedoraproject.org/message/3WQ342R7NKEJVSK62XZD54S5F6I7A7GO/
> > 
> > Are you referring to the “in earlier versions of Discourse“, so it's
> > just gone?  With the expectation that we won't need it because we
> > receive notifications for everything in the categories we “watch”?
> 
> Thats my understanding, yes. I could be wrong... 

I believe the upthread discussion said that in recent versions of
Discourse it is disabled (server-side) by default, but there is a
(again server-side) option to turn it on again.
-- 
Adam Williamson (he/him/his)
Fedora QA
Fedora Chat: @adamwill:fedora.im | Mastodon: @ad...@fosstodon.org
https://www.happyassassin.net



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Re: It’s time to transform the Fedora devel list into something new

[Kevin Fenzi]

On Tue, Apr 25, 2023 at 07:25:06PM +0200, Florian Weimer wrote:
> * Kevin Fenzi:
> 
> > On Tue, Apr 25, 2023 at 10:24:37AM -0500, Michael Catanzaro wrote:
> >> On Tue, Apr 25 2023 at 11:32:14 AM +0200, Florian Weimer
> >>  wrote:
> >> > This option has been disabled in the Fedora instance, though.  There
> >> > should be “Mailing list mode“ and “Enable mailing list mode” at the end
> >> > of this page:
> >> > 
> >> >   
> >> > 
> >> > But in my case at least, it's missing.
> >> 
> >> Seconding this question. What's up with this?
> >> 
> >> The mailing list mode is not amazing, but it is adequate. Without it,
> >> participation in Fedora devel discussions will plummet. At least there's no
> >> chance I'll manually browse the web forum to see what's going on.
> >
> > As Matthew said in an eariler post in this very thread: 
> > https://lists.fedoraproject.org/archives/list/devel@lists.fedoraproject.org/message/3WQ342R7NKEJVSK62XZD54S5F6I7A7GO/
> 
> Are you referring to the “in earlier versions of Discourse“, so it's
> just gone?  With the expectation that we won't need it because we
> receive notifications for everything in the categories we “watch”?

Thats my understanding, yes. I could be wrong... 

kevin


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Re: It’s time to transform the Fedora devel list into something new

[Florian Weimer]

* Kevin Fenzi:

> On Tue, Apr 25, 2023 at 10:24:37AM -0500, Michael Catanzaro wrote:
>> On Tue, Apr 25 2023 at 11:32:14 AM +0200, Florian Weimer
>>  wrote:
>> > This option has been disabled in the Fedora instance, though.  There
>> > should be “Mailing list mode“ and “Enable mailing list mode” at the end
>> > of this page:
>> > 
>> >   
>> > 
>> > But in my case at least, it's missing.
>> 
>> Seconding this question. What's up with this?
>> 
>> The mailing list mode is not amazing, but it is adequate. Without it,
>> participation in Fedora devel discussions will plummet. At least there's no
>> chance I'll manually browse the web forum to see what's going on.
>
> As Matthew said in an eariler post in this very thread: 
> https://lists.fedoraproject.org/archives/list/devel@lists.fedoraproject.org/message/3WQ342R7NKEJVSK62XZD54S5F6I7A7GO/

Are you referring to the “in earlier versions of Discourse“, so it's
just gone?  With the expectation that we won't need it because we
receive notifications for everything in the categories we “watch”?

Thanks,
Florian
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Re: It’s time to transform the Fedora devel list into something new

[Fabio Valentini]

On Tue, Apr 25, 2023 at 6:29 PM stan via devel
 wrote:
>

(snip)

>
> I've read all the responses to the announcement, and I don't think I've
> seen an architectural analysis.
> What communication requirements does a project like Fedora need?
> What is the theoretical optimal process for each requirement?
> Is there an existing optimal tool for each of those optimal
> processes?
> Are there sub optimal tools that can be used for multiple requirements?
> Is the loss of effectiveness / efficiency of using a sub optimal
> tool worth the reduction in the number of tools?
>
> This is trying to answer the question, "If there was a magic wand we
> could wave, and perfectly satisfy the communication needs of the
> fedora project, what would that look like?"  And, "How would we get
> from here to there?"

+1 to this. I am mostly in camp "grumpy old man doesn't want to use
new program", but I think we can (and should!) have a discussion about
what things happen on the "devel" list.
Are there things that are currently handled via the "devel" mailing
list that don't necessarily need to be, and for which Discourse might
even be a better tool?

Emails sent to the devel list seem to mostly belong to these categories:

- announcement and discussion of Change Proposals
- announcement and coordination of breaking changes (like soname bumps
/ API changes)
- discussion of various RFCs / proposals which might eventually become
Change proposals
- various other announcements (packages {un,}orphaned, packages
{un,}retired, etc.)
- reports (rawhide compose report, rawhide QA report, SPDX conversion
progress, etc.)
- introductions of new packagers seeking sponsors

I don't think moving *everything* to Discourse is a good idea, since
the mailing list is a better *tool* for handling some of these things
- while Discourse might be the better tool for others.

For example (*not serious proposals, just some ideas in an effort to
make this discussion more productive and less black-and-white*):

- Change Proposals could be *announced* on the devel list, but
discussion could happen in a linked topic on Discourse
- announcement and coordination of breaking changes continues to be
handled via the mailing list
- RFCs and maybe-future-Change-Proposals are discussed on Discourse
(maybe with an announcement post on the mailing list)
- orphan/unorphan/retire/unretire announcements stay on the devel list
- reports stay on the devel list (or are moved to a separate "reports"
list that interested parties can subscribe to)
- introductions of new packagers happens in the "Introductions"
category on Discourse (which I believe already exists?)

Yes, most of these examples would be about moving
"discussion-like-things" to discourse while keeping
"announcement-like-things" on the mailing list. That should reduce the
volume of emails on the list dramatically, make it easier for people
to follow, and possibly move actual *discussion* to a tool that was
designed to handle *discussion*. It would also make it very easy to
subscribe to Discourse topics one is interested in, and ignore others.
Just my 2 euro-cents :)

Fabio
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Re: It’s time to transform the Fedora devel list into something new

[Kevin Fenzi]

On Tue, Apr 25, 2023 at 12:12:05AM +0200, Björn Persson wrote:
> Kevin Fenzi wrote:
> > On Sun, Apr 23, 2023 at 11:21:58PM +0200, Björn Persson wrote:
> > > Kevin Fenzi wrote:  
> > > > We could probibly come up with some
> > > > better way to start new topics/discussions  
> > > 
> > > Yes I think I can come up with a better way. Give each tag its own
> > > email address, like a mailing list. That was very easy to come up with.  
> > 
> > I think you mean each category?
> 
> I don't know Discourse but we're told that something called a tag is
> roughly equivalent to a mailing list. I suppose categories could have
> addresses too.

I'm not sure I would say that... I guess there's no 100% equivalents
here.

categories are like "Project Discussion" or "Ask Fedora" and tags can be
any number on any thread.

ie, under "Project Discussion" there's a post about the new website
fronpage revamp:
https://discussion.fedoraproject.org/t/fedora-workstation-front-page-revamp-first-cut-looking-for-feedback/37169/160
that has tags "mindshare websites-and-apps-team design-team
marketing-team"

You can watch a category, or a tag or multiple tags. 

I guess it depends on the level of things you want to get. 

> > But you may want multiple tags on a post... 
> 
> Like Vít said, you can send to multiple addresses. That's how you
> cross-post to multiple mailing lists. The Discourse server would then
> read all the addresses and apply all of those tags and/or categories
> to the post.
> 
> When there are multiple recipient addresses in the same domain, a
> well-behaved SMTP client is supposed to transmit a single copy of the
> message in a single SMTP session with multiple RCPT commands. Thus the
> Discourse server will receive only one copy.
> 
> It is however possible that some badly written program might mishandle
> such a message and send a separate copy to each recipient address. Each
> copy would then still contain the whole list of addresses in the To and
> CC fields. If the Discourse server would read the header fields and not
> just the SMTP envelope, then the copies would appear as duplicate posts,
> each with the full set of tags, not as separate posts with one tag each.
> 
> If duplicates would turn out to be a great nuisance, then the Discourse
> developers might want to add a deduplication feature. The Message-ID
> field would be useful for discovering duplicates, but deduplication
> should not be done based on the message ID alone. The full contents
> should be compared to ensure that the messages really are identical, in
> case some defective or malicious email client produces non-unique
> message IDs.

Sure, thats all possible.

> As you can see, it doesn't take any great inventions to do this. The
> email standards already contain the necessary features. They just need
> to be implemented, if the Discourse developers are serious about
> supporting interaction by email.

well, as you well know, coming up with ideas on how things could work is
often the easy part. :) I have no idea how willing they would be to work
on this... but you can ask on https://meta.discourse.org/
> 
> > But that also doesn't solve the spam problem... anyone could send to
> > those addresses, and indeed spammers will. ;( 
> 
> We're told that only sender addresses associated with a Fedora account
> are allowed to send to the single global new-topic address. Obviously

I don't think thats the case at all. Currently I think anyone can send,
it just gets moderated. But I would defer to Matthew here...

> that would apply to the tag (and category) addresses too. That's
> analogous to reducing spam to mailing lists by accepting posts only
> from subscribers.

It's worth noting that if you get emails from discourse the reply-to is
set to a hash so it knows who you are and what you are replying to so it
can insert it in.
> 
> In what scenario do tag-specific new-topic addresses result in a worse
> spam problem than a single global new-topic address?

Currently as far as I know if you send in, you need to either be using a
reply-to that has the right hash or sending to the global email which
will be moderated. If we unmoderated the global address it would be the
same spam problem as new-topic ones would have (although that would help
solve the topic problem).
> 
> > But perhaps this could be useful with some other way to autenticate
> > posts.
> 
> I haven't seen spammers impersonate subscribers in the mailing lists.
> The occasional spam that gets into the mailing lists seems to be done
> by subscribing a disposable address and sending from that address.

Usually yes. I have seen impersonations in the past. It doesn't seem to
be as common anymore.
> 
> If spammers would start putting in a legitimate user's address as sender
> to get the spam into mailing lists or Discourse, then there's DKIM. I
> have found DKIM by itself ineffective, as most of the spam is DKIM-
> signed now, but DKIM combined with a requirement for a known sender
> address 

Re: It’s time to transform the Fedora devel list into something new

[Kevin Fenzi]

On Tue, Apr 25, 2023 at 10:24:37AM -0500, Michael Catanzaro wrote:
> On Tue, Apr 25 2023 at 11:32:14 AM +0200, Florian Weimer
>  wrote:
> > This option has been disabled in the Fedora instance, though.  There
> > should be “Mailing list mode“ and “Enable mailing list mode” at the end
> > of this page:
> > 
> >   
> > 
> > But in my case at least, it's missing.
> 
> Seconding this question. What's up with this?
> 
> The mailing list mode is not amazing, but it is adequate. Without it,
> participation in Fedora devel discussions will plummet. At least there's no
> chance I'll manually browse the web forum to see what's going on.

As Matthew said in an eariler post in this very thread: 
https://lists.fedoraproject.org/archives/list/devel@lists.fedoraproject.org/message/3WQ342R7NKEJVSK62XZD54S5F6I7A7GO/

> "Mailing list mode" was a specific thing in earlier versions of Discourse —
> it sent a notification for every message posted. This is kind of like going
> to Hyperkitty and saying "subscribe me to all 600 lists". I don't recommend
> that. Instead, choose specific tags that you want to subscribe to, just as
> you would subscribe to individual mailing lists.

kevin


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Re: It’s time to transform the Fedora devel list into something new

[stan via devel]

On Mon, 24 Apr 2023 19:47:07 +0200
Kamil Paral  wrote:

> On Thu, Apr 20, 2023 at 11:21 PM Matthew Miller
>  wrote:
> 
> > I propose that we transition devel list, and eventually most of our
> > mailing lists, to Fedora Discussion (our Discourse-powered forum).

> project is going to die eventually. Mailing lists are a big hurdle
> for newcomers. Young people are not used to it (who still uses
> mailing lists, in read-write mode, except for OSS communities?), the
> lists are difficult to set up, the user interfaces are bad, there are
> many peculiarities to be aware of (top-posting, etc).

I think an analogy would be that mailing lists are like vim or emacs,
and web forums are like nano.  To someone who is used to using a power
editor, using nano is irritating.  Sure they can accomplish the task,
but it is like slogging through mud instead of running on a track.
If all you've ever known is slogging through mud, of course, that
is going to be acceptable, and using a power editor is going to be like
slogging through mud (because of the learning curve).

I think that is why there are so many complaints about the switch from
existing mail list users.  They have a system in place that allows them
to run, and really don't want to slog through mud instead.

The change to a forum doesn't really benefit them.  The benefits mainly
accrue to the maintainers and managers of the forums, not the users.  I
suppose it could be argued that if the change makes the project more
efficient, more viable, they are gaining a benefit, but what assurances
are there that the benefit will happen?  i.e. what evidence is there
that the benefit they are slogging through mud for will actually occur?

I've read all the responses to the announcement, and I don't think I've
seen an architectural analysis.  
What communication requirements does a project like Fedora need?
What is the theoretical optimal process for each requirement?
Is there an existing optimal tool for each of those optimal
processes?
Are there sub optimal tools that can be used for multiple requirements?
Is the loss of effectiveness / efficiency of using a sub optimal
tool worth the reduction in the number of tools?

This is trying to answer the question, "If there was a magic wand we
could wave, and perfectly satisfy the communication needs of the
fedora project, what would that look like?"  And, "How would we get
from here to there?"
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Re: It’s time to transform the Fedora devel list into something new

[Michael Catanzaro]

On Tue, Apr 25 2023 at 11:32:14 AM +0200, Florian Weimer 
 wrote:

This option has been disabled in the Fedora instance, though.  There
should be “Mailing list mode“ and “Enable mailing list mode” 
at the end

of this page:

  

But in my case at least, it's missing.


Seconding this question. What's up with this?

The mailing list mode is not amazing, but it is adequate. Without it, 
participation in Fedora devel discussions will plummet. At least 
there's no chance I'll manually browse the web forum to see what's 
going on.


Michael

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Re: It’s time to transform the Fedora devel list into something new

[Kamil Paral]

On Tue, Apr 25, 2023 at 4:21 AM Kevin Kofler via devel <
devel@lists.fedoraproject.org> wrote:

> * An absurd assumption that everyone is new to the Internet, leading to
> lots
> of ridiculous gamified spam "achievements" for basic things such as
> replying
> to a thread, with which you get bothered on every single Discourse forum
> you
> (have to) sign up to.
>

This is a part I agree with. I've been very annoyed by the gamified
achievements, and I haven't found a way to completely shut them off.
Fortunately they stopped appearing after some time, perhaps I earned all of
them already. Or perhaps they were enabled on Ask, but they're not enabled
on Discussions?

Matt, is this something configurable?
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Re: It’s time to transform the Fedora devel list into something new

[Dominik 'Rathann' Mierzejewski]

On Tuesday, 25 April 2023 at 12:30, Florian Weimer wrote:
> * Dominik Mierzejewski:
> 
> > You don't have threaded replies, either. And quoting the post you're
> > replying to is entirely non-intuitive. It took me a while to discover
> > that you have to click on the "speech bubble" icon inside the editor that
> > opens after you click reply.
> 
> In some instances at least, you can select the text in the fragment you
> are replying to, and a quote button will appear.  I at least found that
> quite discoverable.

You have to use your mouse to do it, which is too disrupting for me.

> >> Renaming topics works in a much saner way.
> >> You can deal with 'cross-posting' in a much saner and more flexible
> >> way. Quoting is always a problem everywhere, but that's only *one*
> >> thing, at least. :D
> >
> > Quoting and threading are the fundamental features in text-based
> > non-realtime conversations, so switching to a medium that offers
> > inferior quoting and no threading is questionable at best.
> 
> I tend to agree, but most clients only offer rudimentary support to show
> the metadata that's there.  Nowadays, a lot of people pick a random
> message in a thread and reply to that, disregarding what that particular
> message contributed to the conversation.  I can't really blame them
> because in the interfaces they are used do, it does not make a
> difference for presentation purposes.

That seems to be the sad reality of many of the web-based forums
I sometimes visit, so yes, my anecdotal evidence confirms your
observations.

> I'm not sure if nested threading
> in email ever went mainstream, to be honest.

It depends on the mailing lists you are subscribed to. The technical
ones tend to make use of threading efficiently.

> Discourse and similar tools may merely reflect that lack of
> familiarity.

No argument there.

> I couldn't consume the volume of mail I process without it because
> nested threading still works on most of the technical lists I frequent,
> but I suppose it's a dying art.

Call me a dinosaur. ;) I have no intention of dying out any time soon,
though. ;)

Regards,
Dominik
-- 
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Re: It’s time to transform the Fedora devel list into something new

[Florian Weimer]

* Dominik Mierzejewski:

> You don't have threaded replies, either. And quoting the post you're
> replying to is entirely non-intuitive. It took me a while to discover
> that you have to click on the "speech bubble" icon inside the editor that
> opens after you click reply.

In some instances at least, you can select the text in the fragment you
are replying to, and a quote button will appear.  I at least found that
quite discoverable.

>> Renaming topics works in a much saner way.
>> You can deal with 'cross-posting' in a much saner and more flexible
>> way. Quoting is always a problem everywhere, but that's only *one*
>> thing, at least. :D
>
> Quoting and threading are the fundamental features in text-based
> non-realtime conversations, so switching to a medium that offers
> inferior quoting and no threading is questionable at best.

I tend to agree, but most clients only offer rudimentary support to show
the metadata that's there.  Nowadays, a lot of people pick a random
message in a thread and reply to that, disregarding what that particular
message contributed to the conversation.  I can't really blame them
because in the interfaces they are used do, it does not make a
difference for presentation purposes.  I'm not sure if nested threading
in email ever went mainstream, to be honest.  Discourse and similar
tools may merely reflect that lack of familiarity.

I couldn't consume the volume of mail I process without it because
nested threading still works on most of the technical lists I frequent,
but I suppose it's a dying art.

Thanks,
Florian
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Re: It’s time to transform the Fedora devel list into something new

[Dominik 'Rathann' Mierzejewski]

On Friday, 21 April 2023 at 20:17, Adam Williamson wrote:
> On Fri, 2023-04-21 at 11:00 -0400, Solomon Peachy via devel wrote:
> > On Fri, Apr 21, 2023 at 04:55:00PM +0200, Emmanuel Seyman wrote:
> > > I agree there's a huge lack of netiquette in Fedora's mailing lists,
> > > with wholesale quoting, top-posting, subjects not being updated, etc but
> > > changing mediums seems far more expensive than asking people to post
> > > emails that are easier to read.
> > 
> > Not to mention these problems won't go away just because it's now hosted 
> > on a web page..
> 
> Well, not because it's hosted on a web page, but a more structured
> system *does* address a lot of these problems. A lot of what you're
> referring to as "netiquette" is really about putting the onus on each
> individual user to do stuff that a more sophisticated system could
> handle for them, and a system like discourse *does* handle those. You
> can't top-post on discourse.

You don't have threaded replies, either. And quoting the post you're
replying to is entirely non-intuitive. It took me a while to discover
that you have to click on the "speech bubble" icon inside the editor that
opens after you click reply.

> Renaming topics works in a much saner way.
> You can deal with 'cross-posting' in a much saner and more flexible
> way. Quoting is always a problem everywhere, but that's only *one*
> thing, at least. :D

Quoting and threading are the fundamental features in text-based
non-realtime conversations, so switching to a medium that offers
inferior quoting and no threading is questionable at best.

As can be deduced from my UA header, I'm firmly in the e-mail camp
and, similar to others in this thread, I find web-based forums
unintuitive and difficult to use efficiently because of lack of
efficient keyboard control. Yes, there are keyboard shortcuts in
Discourse, but they don't allow you to browse through and open
expand highlighted threads, jump to Nth thread/message, etc.

Efficient navigation requires combined keyboard/mouse usage, which
disrupts the experience.

Regards,
Dominik
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Re: It’s time to transform the Fedora devel list into something new

[Florian Weimer]

* Kevin Fenzi:

> Yes, you absolutely can interact with discourse via email (mostly).

This option has been disabled in the Fedora instance, though.  There
should be “Mailing list mode“ and “Enable mailing list mode” at the end
of this page:

  

But in my case at least, it's missing.

Thanks,
Florian
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Re: It’s time to transform the Fedora devel list into something new

[Florian Weimer]

* Kevin Fenzi:

> Right. I don't think we have many (or possibly any) lists that still
> hold email from non-members. The flood of spam is just too high for that
> for the last N years. So, almost all our lists are set to reject non
> member posts. :(

That's really unfortunate because it makes it harder to collaborate, not
just for newcomers.  You really need to be in control of your email
setup and make sure you match addresses.  It also makes mail-based
cross-distribution collaboration very difficult.  Other mailing list
operators do not seem to have to do this, while maintaining acceptable
spam levels.

Anyway, the present state of Fedora mailing lists sort of addresses my
concerns about moving Fedora into a Discourse silo because Fedora seems
to have removed itself from the collaborative email sphere a while ago
anyway.

Thanks,
Florian
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Re: It’s time to transform the Fedora devel list into something new

[Tom Hughes via devel]

On 25/04/2023 09:40, Florian Weimer wrote:

* Jarek Prokop:


Personally, I have accounts on many, many Discourse instances, but I
don't think there is a single one I read somewhat regularly.  I find the
mailing list mode and the notifications rather unpredictable.  Maybe an
alternative client could help (nndiscourse?), but as far as I understand
it, there's no real API, so that's kind of hard?


I could find an API docs, and I could retreive posts.json from our
Fedora instance

https://docs.discourse.org/

So the question is, what is a "real API" that you would consider OK?


There has to be a login procedure, and it needs to be geared towards
alternative clients.  We currently have only this:

| To become authenticated you will need to create an API Key from the
| admin panel.

So its seems to be restricted to admin-approved integrations, and is not
intended for writing clients.


It is possible to allow users to generate their own API keys without
any admin involvement but there's no direct web interface to create
one - the client has to make a call to /user-api-key/new with certain 
parameters - full details are here:


https://meta.discourse.org/t/user-api-keys-specification/48536

Tom

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Re: It’s time to transform the Fedora devel list into something new

[Florian Weimer]

* Stephen Smoogen:

> It is time to explore other options. One of them is the proposal that
> Matthew and I guess the Council have come up with. It is using a
> resource which is paid for, has an open source background, and is
> willing to make some changes to better accommodate other workflows. If
> people want something else they are going to need to come up with a
> proposal which does not include using existing burned out resources to
> accomplish it.

Have you considered outsourcing email (list) operations instead?

Discourse needs to solve the same issues to keep email notifications
working.  Do we know how well they are doing?  Discourse seems to have
stopped offering mailing list mode in the Fedora instance.  I wonder
whether this is related.

Thanks,
Florian
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Re: It’s time to transform the Fedora devel list into something new

[Florian Weimer]

* Jarek Prokop:

>> Personally, I have accounts on many, many Discourse instances, but I
>> don't think there is a single one I read somewhat regularly.  I find the
>> mailing list mode and the notifications rather unpredictable.  Maybe an
>> alternative client could help (nndiscourse?), but as far as I understand
>> it, there's no real API, so that's kind of hard?
>
> I could find an API docs, and I could retreive posts.json from our
> Fedora instance
>
> https://docs.discourse.org/
>
> So the question is, what is a "real API" that you would consider OK?

There has to be a login procedure, and it needs to be geared towards
alternative clients.  We currently have only this:

| To become authenticated you will need to create an API Key from the
| admin panel.

So its seems to be restricted to admin-approved integrations, and is not
intended for writing clients.

Thanks,
Florian
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Re: It’s time to transform the Fedora devel list into something new

[Kevin Kofler via devel]

Kamil Paral wrote:
> I've spent more than a decade perfecting my email filters and I have a
> setup that works for me very well. I dislike certain aspects of mailing
> lists (cross-posting, top-posting, reply-to, etc, which just can't work
> well when everyone has to be vigilant all the time to do things right),
> but I *like* my existing setup and processes. But that's me, us, the old
> timers.

But that is exactly why it is an absurd idea to move away from mailing 
lists. Fedora will *lose* all the existing contributors like you or me.

> Having said that, my impression is that mailing lists are an already lost
> battle. If you don't have an influx of new contributors, your project is
> going to die eventually. Mailing lists are a big hurdle for newcomers.
> Young people are not used to it (who still uses mailing lists, in
> read-write mode, except for OSS communities?), the lists are difficult to
> set up, the user interfaces are bad, there are many peculiarities to be
> aware of (top-posting, etc). I don't know if moving away from mailing
> lists will make our contributor base grow, but I'm quite certain that
> staying with mailing lists will make our contributor base **not** grow.
> And our project will slowly decline over time.

I strongly doubt that the mailing list is the main barrier to entry to 
Fedora (as opposed to, e.g., packaging guidelines, etc.).

If the issue is that the mailing list is flooding your inbox and you are 
unable to filter it, the remedy is simple: Disable mail delivery and use 
Gmane NNTP or HyperKitty to read and post to the mailing list. That choice 
of preferred technology will go away if we move to a locked-in web platform 
such as Discourse. (I know it is FOSS and the data can be exported somehow. 
It is still a lock-in for the end user.)

> Imagine that you want to contribute to a project and you discover they're
> still using svn, or cvs. There are still some. I personally wouldn't be
> bothered, I'd just invest time elsewhere. I value my time.

I do not see the problem. I just need to bring up another UI (Kdesvn or 
Cervisia instead of Git-Cola), so what? All I care is that I can update from 
upstream and commit/push my changes.

Heck, I still use SVN for *my* personal projects.

And not everything is better with git. SVN basically guarantees a linear 
history whereas with git, I have to follow a specific workflow for that 
(always pull with rebase, never with the default merge strategy, and for 
work branches, always rebase and force-push them rather than merging 
master/main into them, then when done fast-forward them to the master/main), 
and when working with other people, I usually cannot get them to use it, so 
the history becomes a complicated DAG with a mess of merge commits, grrr!

> I already have some experience with Discourse and so far it seemed OK to
> me.

I have some experience with Discourse as well and it is just a pain:
* A silly reliance on JavaScript and AJAX for everything instead of server-
side code. In particular, this means it takes several seconds to render a 
page on mobile devices such as the PinePhone.
* A constant requirement of the latest bleeding edge browser, no 
support for QtWebEngine LTS branches.
* An absurd assumption that everyone is new to the Internet, leading to lots 
of ridiculous gamified spam "achievements" for basic things such as replying 
to a thread, with which you get bothered on every single Discourse forum you 
(have to) sign up to.
etc.

I do not understand why everybody is moving to this annoying piece of 
software and throwing away not only mailing lists, but also web forums using 
much better software (i.e., pretty much any other forum software), for it.

> But I haven't used it as frequently and in such a volume as mailing
> lists. I also still haven't built my workflow alternative to my email
> workflow in there. But I'd be happy to experiment with it. But in order to
> get real-world experience, it would be great if this was a shared
> experience, where a mass of users really moves and starts using it as a
> primary discussion platform. Then we can collectively figure out the
> benefits and drawbacks and any workarounds for those drawbacks.

The drawbacks are well known (see above) and the platform is basically 
unusable. There is no need to experiment with it to find that out. And 
"get[ting] real-world experience" by forcing everyone to use it "as a 
primary discussion platform" is just unacceptable.

Kevin Kofler
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Re: It’s time to transform the Fedora devel list into something new

[Björn Persson]

Kevin Fenzi wrote:
> On Sun, Apr 23, 2023 at 11:21:58PM +0200, Björn Persson wrote:
> > Kevin Fenzi wrote:  
> > > We could probibly come up with some
> > > better way to start new topics/discussions  
> > 
> > Yes I think I can come up with a better way. Give each tag its own
> > email address, like a mailing list. That was very easy to come up with.  
> 
> I think you mean each category?

I don't know Discourse but we're told that something called a tag is
roughly equivalent to a mailing list. I suppose categories could have
addresses too.

> But you may want multiple tags on a post... 

Like Vít said, you can send to multiple addresses. That's how you
cross-post to multiple mailing lists. The Discourse server would then
read all the addresses and apply all of those tags and/or categories
to the post.

When there are multiple recipient addresses in the same domain, a
well-behaved SMTP client is supposed to transmit a single copy of the
message in a single SMTP session with multiple RCPT commands. Thus the
Discourse server will receive only one copy.

It is however possible that some badly written program might mishandle
such a message and send a separate copy to each recipient address. Each
copy would then still contain the whole list of addresses in the To and
CC fields. If the Discourse server would read the header fields and not
just the SMTP envelope, then the copies would appear as duplicate posts,
each with the full set of tags, not as separate posts with one tag each.

If duplicates would turn out to be a great nuisance, then the Discourse
developers might want to add a deduplication feature. The Message-ID
field would be useful for discovering duplicates, but deduplication
should not be done based on the message ID alone. The full contents
should be compared to ensure that the messages really are identical, in
case some defective or malicious email client produces non-unique
message IDs.

As you can see, it doesn't take any great inventions to do this. The
email standards already contain the necessary features. They just need
to be implemented, if the Discourse developers are serious about
supporting interaction by email.

> But that also doesn't solve the spam problem... anyone could send to
> those addresses, and indeed spammers will. ;( 

We're told that only sender addresses associated with a Fedora account
are allowed to send to the single global new-topic address. Obviously
that would apply to the tag (and category) addresses too. That's
analogous to reducing spam to mailing lists by accepting posts only
from subscribers.

In what scenario do tag-specific new-topic addresses result in a worse
spam problem than a single global new-topic address?

> But perhaps this could be useful with some other way to autenticate
> posts.

I haven't seen spammers impersonate subscribers in the mailing lists.
The occasional spam that gets into the mailing lists seems to be done
by subscribing a disposable address and sending from that address.

If spammers would start putting in a legitimate user's address as sender
to get the spam into mailing lists or Discourse, then there's DKIM. I
have found DKIM by itself ineffective, as most of the spam is DKIM-
signed now, but DKIM combined with a requirement for a known sender
address should be sufficient authentication to stop spam. The spammer
would at least have to actually send from the same domain as the user
they impersonate.

For registered users whose email provider doesn't sign their messages
with DKIM, a verification message could be sent that they have to reply
to, like when signing up for a mailing list but repeated for every post
that isn't a reply. There's also OpenPGP/MIME. But I rather doubt that
such measures will be needed just to fight spam. Strong authentication
is for preventing more targeted attacks than spam.

Björn Persson


pgpHIaugWIhhr.pgp
Description: OpenPGP digital signatur
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Re: It’s time to transform the Fedora devel list into something new

[Gabriel Ramirez via devel]

On 4/23/23 18:32, Kevin Fenzi wrote:

You can write the tag after the plus sign if that makes it easier to
implement. Instead of"fedoraproject+newto...@discoursemail.com"  the
address could be"fedoraproject+de...@discoursemail.com"  or maybe
"fedoraproject+devel/newto...@discoursemail.com". Or some other format.
The local-part can be structured any way the Discourse developers like,
as long as it's at most 64 bytes and adheres to the dot-atom-text syntax
in RFC 5322.

But that also doesn't solve the spam problem... anyone could send to
those addresses, and indeed spammers will. ;(


I have not used the forum mailing lists so I don't know if they already 
include the following: Perhaps in each email include the url 
corresponding to the forum post, so that if you want to answer it, you 
have to do it from the forum, so the mailing lists can be read-only 
Gabrielo

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Re: It’s time to transform the Fedora devel list into something new

[Kamil Paral]

On Thu, Apr 20, 2023 at 11:21 PM Matthew Miller 
wrote:

> I propose that we transition devel list, and eventually most of our
> mailing lists, to Fedora Discussion (our Discourse-powered forum).
>

I've spent more than a decade perfecting my email filters and I have a
setup that works for me very well. I dislike certain aspects of mailing
lists (cross-posting, top-posting, reply-to, etc, which just can't work
well when everyone has to be vigilant all the time to do things right), but
I *like* my existing setup and processes. But that's me, us, the old timers.

Having said that, my impression is that mailing lists are an already lost
battle. If you don't have an influx of new contributors, your project is
going to die eventually. Mailing lists are a big hurdle for newcomers.
Young people are not used to it (who still uses mailing lists, in
read-write mode, except for OSS communities?), the lists are difficult to
set up, the user interfaces are bad, there are many peculiarities to be
aware of (top-posting, etc). I don't know if moving away from mailing lists
will make our contributor base grow, but I'm quite certain that staying
with mailing lists will make our contributor base **not** grow. And our
project will slowly decline over time.

Imagine that you want to contribute to a project and you discover they're
still using svn, or cvs. There are still some. I personally wouldn't be
bothered, I'd just invest time elsewhere. I value my time. I imagine this
feeling might be similar to what younger people feel when they're asked to
use a mailing list. It would require too much investment from them, and so
they'll go somewhere else with a more comfortable barrier to entry.

With some things, there's a simple transition path, because new things are
both technically superior and more comfortable at the same time, and still
extremely similar. Svn -> git. Plain git -> git with pull requests. Irc ->
Matrix. But we don't really have the same equivalent with mailing lists. I
guess mailman3+hyperkitty was supposed to be that replacement, but as we
can see, it didn't work out. A discussion forum is very different, but it's
a workflow that people are familiar with and has much easier onboarding.
Mailing lists are a lost cause. They are being abandoned, nobody migrates
*to* mailing lists. If we want to keep new blood flowing in, we can't be
afraid to change stuff. We have to adapt, instead of requiring everyone
else to adapt to us.

I already have some experience with Discourse and so far it seemed OK to
me. But I haven't used it as frequently and in such a volume as mailing
lists. I also still haven't built my workflow alternative to my email
workflow in there. But I'd be happy to experiment with it. But in order to
get real-world experience, it would be great if this was a shared
experience, where a mass of users really moves and starts using it as a
primary discussion platform. Then we can collectively figure out the
benefits and drawbacks and any workarounds for those drawbacks.

Cheers,
Kamil
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Re: It’s time to transform the Fedora devel list into something new

[Stephen Smoogen]

On Mon, 24 Apr 2023 at 09:38, Simo Sorce  wrote:

> On Sat, 2023-04-22 at 12:16 -0700, Adam Williamson wrote:
> > On Sat, 2023-04-22 at 10:37 -0700, Kevin Fenzi wrote:
> > > On Fri, Apr 21, 2023 at 02:30:45PM -0700, Adam Williamson wrote:
> > > > On Fri, 2023-04-21 at 23:20 +0200, Florian Weimer wrote:
> > > > >
> > > > > > For lists that are active, the split is confusing — when should
> > > > > > something be on the packaging list rather than devel? What
> happens when
> > > > > > something is related to both Cloud and Server, or Workstation
> and KDE?
> > > > > > One can post to both lists, but if someone replies and isn’t
> subscribed
> > > > > > to both, the conversation gets split.
> > > > >
> > > > > Do Fedora mailing lists reject mail from non-members, and redirect
> > > > > follow-ups?
> > > >
> > > > Many lists *hold* mail from non-members, because mailing lists get
> tons
> > > > of spam. So the mail won't get through until an admin approves it.
> That
> > > > might happen right away...or it might happen in two days, when the
> mail
> > > > is no longer relevant. We can't really just let all mails from non-
> > > > members through because...spam.
> > >
> > > Right. I don't think we have many (or possibly any) lists that still
> > > hold email from non-members. The flood of spam is just too high for
> that
> > > for the last N years. So, almost all our lists are set to reject non
> > > member posts. :(
> >
> > ah, I hadn't noticed that change :/ I could've sworn I still sometimes
> > get hold notices when I send meeting announcements to lists I'm not
> > subscribed to...
>
> In theory we could make it simpler by sending back a message that
> requires just a click to subscribe/authorize the email by a real user,
> if they intend to do so, on their first email to a mailing list.
> We could also allow posting to other mailing lists if the email address
> is subscribed to any other list.
>
>
We had this running for a bit where we would send back emails saying this
is held. 99% of the emails would then go sit in queue on bastion slowing
down regular deliveries. We are talking hundreds of emails a day on 'good'
days and tens of thousands on 'bad' days. Trying to deal with this is a
full time job that no one is paid (and my volunteer time is limited) to do.
Trying to fix in better ways is usually a massive project because you need
to think out the total email flow plan and needs. Email is no longer the
old 'set up a mail server and let it live'. It is 'why do we have 10,000
queued emails today?' 'why aren't redhat.com emails getting delivered
today?' 'oh look 2 new DNS features to 'deal' with SPAM', 'oh spamassassin
needs new setup and fixes', 'why is email stuck here?' 'why is X sending
email to google.com but we are getting errors from gandhi.net or
protonmail.com'.

The software which runs mailing lists is also much more complicated than it
was 20 years ago. You need to deal with backend databases, caching web
servers, internal search engines, message tooling, spam deletion, account
acceptance, etc. That takes constant learning and dedicated 'brain' space
for admins to keep it working.

In order to keep email working, it takes dedicated and hard work and
decisions to make it happen.

I realize this would require working on mailman and that is probably
> something we do not want to spend time on ...
>
> After all you have to subscribe to discourse as well to be able to post
> ... so there is no huge difference here.
>
> --
> Simo Sorce
> RHEL Crypto Team
> Red Hat, Inc
>
>
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Re: It’s time to transform the Fedora devel list into something new

[Ben Cotton]

On Sat, Apr 22, 2023 at 1:24 AM Benson Muite  wrote:
>
> Thanks, this is helpful. Can you make the scripts/programs you used for
> these available to allow for a more detailed analysis?

No, because I literally went to each page of the archives and copied
the numbers into a spreadsheet. If you want to do a more in-depth
analysis, you can download the mbox archive file.

On Sat, Apr 22, 2023 at 12:28 PM Zbigniew Jędrzejewski-Szmek
 wrote:
>
> Could we have the same graph for discourse (and Fedora telegram and Fedora
> matrix)? It'd be interesting to see what percentage of active communicating
> users are active on the mailing list.

I can't provide that, but someone could do that analysis. The hard
part would be mapping the email addresses to Fedora accounts,
especially as those may have changed over the years (and there are
theoretically people on this list who don't have a Fedora account at
all).

That speaks to some of the questions that come from the quick graphs I
did: how many mailing list threads are of the zero-engagement
announcement variety, versus active discussion? And what's the
distribution of threads for users? Do most people reply to one or two
threads and a handful reply to dozens?

--
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Re: It’s time to transform the Fedora devel list into something new

[Simo Sorce]

On Sat, 2023-04-22 at 12:16 -0700, Adam Williamson wrote:
> On Sat, 2023-04-22 at 10:37 -0700, Kevin Fenzi wrote:
> > On Fri, Apr 21, 2023 at 02:30:45PM -0700, Adam Williamson wrote:
> > > On Fri, 2023-04-21 at 23:20 +0200, Florian Weimer wrote:
> > > > 
> > > > > For lists that are active, the split is confusing — when should
> > > > > something be on the packaging list rather than devel? What happens 
> > > > > when
> > > > > something is related to both Cloud and Server, or Workstation and KDE?
> > > > > One can post to both lists, but if someone replies and isn’t 
> > > > > subscribed
> > > > > to both, the conversation gets split.
> > > > 
> > > > Do Fedora mailing lists reject mail from non-members, and redirect
> > > > follow-ups?
> > > 
> > > Many lists *hold* mail from non-members, because mailing lists get tons
> > > of spam. So the mail won't get through until an admin approves it. That
> > > might happen right away...or it might happen in two days, when the mail
> > > is no longer relevant. We can't really just let all mails from non-
> > > members through because...spam.
> > 
> > Right. I don't think we have many (or possibly any) lists that still
> > hold email from non-members. The flood of spam is just too high for that
> > for the last N years. So, almost all our lists are set to reject non
> > member posts. :(
> 
> ah, I hadn't noticed that change :/ I could've sworn I still sometimes
> get hold notices when I send meeting announcements to lists I'm not
> subscribed to...

In theory we could make it simpler by sending back a message that
requires just a click to subscribe/authorize the email by a real user,
if they intend to do so, on their first email to a mailing list.
We could also allow posting to other mailing lists if the email address
is subscribed to any other list.

I realize this would require working on mailman and that is probably
something we do not want to spend time on ...

After all you have to subscribe to discourse as well to be able to post
... so there is no huge difference here.

-- 
Simo Sorce
RHEL Crypto Team
Red Hat, Inc


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Re: It’s time to transform the Fedora devel list into something new

[Simo Sorce]

On Fri, 2023-04-21 at 15:39 -0500, Carl George wrote:
> As Matthew stated, Ben has measured it and fewer people are
> participating on the mailing list over time.  We are already leaving
> out many contributors.

This is an interpretation, but are we sure we are missing them because
the mailing list is uninviting, and not just because the pool of
interested people is shrinking?


>   Those conversations are largely moving to
> issue trackers, which are also not perfect but are clearly more
> appealing than email for many people.

Issue trackers are a pretty good way to deal with issues, we should
have a better issue tracker that makes those conversations better, not
discourage them to make everything flow in non-descript mailing lists
or forums...

>   Discourse has the potential to
> be a more attractive alternative than both email and issue trackers.

And less attractive to people that work better with mailing lists and
issue trackers...

> To me this seems like a solid strategy for reversing the trend and
> getting more people participating in development discussions.

I really dislike this fixation on numbers. We need higher quality and
we need to discuss what is really needed. Numbers shouldn't be priority
number one, unless there are other underlying issues.

Simo.

-- 
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Re: It’s time to transform the Fedora devel list into something new

[Kevin Kofler via devel]

Matthew Miller wrote:
> I propose that we transition devel list, and eventually most of our
> mailing lists, to Fedora Discussion (our Discourse-powered forum).

You are 19 days late for April Fools!

Discourse is an absolute pain in the neck because it not only requires 
JavaScript to be able to participate (the fallback version is read-only), 
but that JavaScript requires the very latest Chromium or Firefox to work at 
all. Maintained LTS branches such as QtWebEngine 5.15 LTS are NOT supported 
and get only the read-only no-JS fallback view:
https://discuss.kde.org/t/discuss-kde-org-cannot-be-accessed-by-konqueror/548

Discourse also does NOT cover the use cases of mailing lists. E-mail 
notification is just that, notification. Everything still happens on the 
JavaScript site. And Discourse does NOT support NNTP access, which is the 
most practical way to interact with a high-volume mailing list such as this 
one. I am writing this post through the Gmane NNTP gateway using KNode, and 
I am also using that to read the threads.

As a result, I consider your proposal absolutely unacceptable.

Kevin Kofler
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Re: It’s time to transform the Fedora devel list into something new

[Jun Aruga (he / him)]

In my opinion, in this kind of big change, it's important for us to
make things reversible, and to consider a possibility for us to go
back.

I think it's better for us to keep the infra of the mailing list for a
while. When we migrate the devel@ to the discourse, we should still
keep to manage other mailing lists without migrating to the discourse.
It's risky to migrate every mailing list at the same time or in a
short period.

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See  for
the timezone.
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Re: It’s time to transform the Fedora devel list into something new

[Vít Ondruch]

Dne 24. 04. 23 v 2:32 Kevin Fenzi napsal(a):

On Sun, Apr 23, 2023 at 11:21:58PM +0200, Björn Persson wrote:

Kevin Fenzi wrote:

We could probibly come up with some
better way to start new topics/discussions

Yes I think I can come up with a better way. Give each tag its own
email address, like a mailing list. That was very easy to come up with.

I think you mean each category? But you may want multiple tags on a
post...



You could send it to multiple email addresses, right?

Vít




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Re: It’s time to transform the Fedora devel list into something new

[Panu Matilainen]

On 4/21/23 23:38, Ben Cotton wrote:

On Fri, Apr 21, 2023 at 4:05 PM Maxwell G  wrote:


What evidence shows that the group is ever shrinking? I often see Self
Introduction posts and new people interacting with project. I suppose
that whether they continue interacting afterwards is another question.


I'm glad you asked. Earlier this week I decided to avoid doing other
work by putting together some quick charts of devel list
participation. Here's the number of unique participants per month from
2004–2022:
https://bcotton.fedorapeople.org/images/devel-participation-monthly.png

And for a less-noisy version, the median of the monthly numbers per year:
https://bcotton.fedorapeople.org/images/devel-participation-mean.png

There are a lot of questions left unanswered by this quick analysis,
but there's a clear trend in fewer participants over time. In fact,
last month had the second smallest participant count (tied with
October 2022). Of course, these charts don't show _why_, but they do
support the assertion that folks are dropping out of the conversation
faster than others are joining.



There are fewer participants than in the early heydays, but to me the 
overall participation figures look remarkably stable over the last ten 
years or so. Certainly not any "we fell off the cliff" type fall I 
expected to see based on the discussion.


- Panu -
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Re: It’s time to transform the Fedora devel list into something new

[Panu Matilainen]

On 4/21/23 22:07, Matthew Miller wrote:

On Fri, Apr 21, 2023 at 11:54:09AM -0400, JT wrote:

So I'm interested by what you bring up here.  Have you run into situations
where someone wanted to contribute to development but was unwilling to use
a mailing list?  With a community as big as Fedora and with a multitude of


I talk to a lot of people about getting involved in Fedora. "Sign up for
this mailing list and introduce yourself" is a big drop-out point.


I would think the latter to be the bigger obstacle of the two.

- Panu -
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Re: It’s time to transform the Fedora devel list into something new

[Kevin Fenzi]

On Sun, Apr 23, 2023 at 11:21:58PM +0200, Björn Persson wrote:
> Kevin Fenzi wrote:
> > We could probibly come up with some
> > better way to start new topics/discussions
> 
> Yes I think I can come up with a better way. Give each tag its own
> email address, like a mailing list. That was very easy to come up with.

I think you mean each category? But you may want multiple tags on a
post... 
ie, 

https://discussion.fedoraproject.org/t/fedora-strategy-2028-focus-area-review-editions-spins-and-interests/79291
is posted in the 'Project Discussion' category with #council and
#strategy2028 tags.
 
> You can write the tag after the plus sign if that makes it easier to
> implement. Instead of "fedoraproject+newto...@discoursemail.com" the
> address could be "fedoraproject+de...@discoursemail.com" or maybe
> "fedoraproject+devel/newto...@discoursemail.com". Or some other format.
> The local-part can be structured any way the Discourse developers like,
> as long as it's at most 64 bytes and adheres to the dot-atom-text syntax
> in RFC 5322.

But that also doesn't solve the spam problem... anyone could send to
those addresses, and indeed spammers will. ;( 

But perhaps this could be useful with some other way to autenticate
posts. Or perhaps there could be some kind of spam detection and require
'spammy' looking posts to be moderated? 

I'm not a discourse maintainer tho, so I have no idea how open
they would be to implementing this.

kevin


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Re: It’s time to transform the Fedora devel list into something new

[Kevin Fenzi]

On Sun, Apr 23, 2023 at 11:21:19PM +0200, Björn Persson wrote:
> Kevin Fenzi wrote:
> > One bug I hit setting this up this weekend... some (but not all) of the
> > categories appear to have newlines in the List-ID: header. ;( 
> > 
> > ie, 
> > 
> > List-ID: Fedora Discussion | Ask Fedora Ask in English
> >  
> > 
> > Hopefully this is a bug that can be fixed... 
> > 
> > So the above won't really work as the MATCH doesn't include the second
> > line with the actual listid in it, only the description. ;( 
> 
> I think you'll have to blame Procmail for that. What you show is called
> folding in RFC 5322. It's valid syntax if the continuation line begins
> with whitespace, which it looks like it does. Folding is even
> recommended for lines longer than 78 characters. Programs that parse
> email are supposed to unfold folded lines.
> 
> The complexities of text-based protocols provide for so much fun!

Indeed. Actually procmail matches on it fine, but it doesn't include the
part after the newline in $MATCH, which makes it harder to parse out the
second part if you want to use that to filter into a maildir with that
name. :( 

I can work around it, it just seems... unexpected and I wanted to
mention it in case others were going down that path.

kevin


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Re: It’s time to transform the Fedora devel list into something new

[Björn Persson]

Kevin Fenzi wrote:
> We could probibly come up with some
> better way to start new topics/discussions

Yes I think I can come up with a better way. Give each tag its own
email address, like a mailing list. That was very easy to come up with.

You can write the tag after the plus sign if that makes it easier to
implement. Instead of "fedoraproject+newto...@discoursemail.com" the
address could be "fedoraproject+de...@discoursemail.com" or maybe
"fedoraproject+devel/newto...@discoursemail.com". Or some other format.
The local-part can be structured any way the Discourse developers like,
as long as it's at most 64 bytes and adheres to the dot-atom-text syntax
in RFC 5322.

Björn Persson


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Re: It’s time to transform the Fedora devel list into something new

[Björn Persson]

Kevin Fenzi wrote:
> One bug I hit setting this up this weekend... some (but not all) of the
> categories appear to have newlines in the List-ID: header. ;( 
> 
> ie, 
> 
> List-ID: Fedora Discussion | Ask Fedora Ask in English
>  
> 
> Hopefully this is a bug that can be fixed... 
> 
> So the above won't really work as the MATCH doesn't include the second
> line with the actual listid in it, only the description. ;( 

I think you'll have to blame Procmail for that. What you show is called
folding in RFC 5322. It's valid syntax if the continuation line begins
with whitespace, which it looks like it does. Folding is even
recommended for lines longer than 78 characters. Programs that parse
email are supposed to unfold folded lines.

The complexities of text-based protocols provide for so much fun!

Björn Persson


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Re: It’s time to transform the Fedora devel list into something new

[Alexander Ploumistos]

Hello Matthew, everyone,

The TL;DR version of my thoughts and suggestions on this topic:
implement the improvements suggested so far as best as possible, so
that the people who want to interact with Discourse through their mail
reader can do so with little to no friction. Clearly define and
document the new tags, what type of information should go where and
who needs to subscribe to which tag. Redefine our information channels
in a saner way, that reflects our consumption and use of that
information. Document on the docs website how subscriptions, filtering
etc. work in the Discourse UI for each use case. Avoid further
community fragmentation by switching cold turkey once the organization
of the site and the mailing features are on par with what people have
come to expect from mailing lists. Turn on the requirement of adhesion
to a fas group for people who can post on the new channels.


Longer version:
Like most of the people who have chimed in so far, I too have strong
opinions and feelings about such a transition. I joined the mailing
list almost a decade ago and I have been following it for much longer.
I am subscribed to a number of lists, I set up my filters ages ago and
over time, as the project and my involvement with it changed, I
adapted those filters with minimal effort. I can certainly sympathize
with all the people who are far more active than I am and who interact
with Fedora first and foremost through these lists, even though I
don't go so far as to run an NNTP server or type my replies in vi
(admittedly, that was fun for a while).

Since this transition is more or less a settled issue, as far as I can
understand, I would like to make some suggestions as to how this could
be as painless as possible for everyone. Before that though, I'd like
to take a moment to point out something that has been very lightly
touched upon, the nature of the medium (e-mail) and its non-technical
aspects. I think most people are acquainted with the formalisms and
the urgency/importance attributed to different means of communication.
We don't feel the same way about a written letter we found in our
mailbox, a phone call, an e-mail, an instant message, an SMS or a
forum post. E-mail commands a certain "decorum" close to that of a
written letter. Perhaps this is the reason why certain people find it
daunting to engage with the project through the mailing lists. At the
same time and while we're no strangers to heated exchanges and a far
cry from literary correspondence, the etiquette dictated by the medium
does create a safe space for its users. We all pretty much understand
and adhere to the rules associated with this kind of written
communication and have certain expectations when we use it and even
more so given our relationship to Fedora. This is not the case with a
forum and certainly not the case with all the people who will go on
d.f.o. For this reason I strongly suggest that the "Project
Discussion" category or whatever subcategory our particular
subcommunity ends up on, is indeed walled off from the rest of the
website. I do not need the noise, the rudeness and the abuse that I
often found on ask.fedoraproject.org (which is now a part of d.f.o) to
flood over these channels. The requirement on people belonging to a
specific fas group before they can post should be on from day one and
exceptions made only when they are warranted.


On Thu, Apr 20, 2023 at 11:21 PM Matthew Miller
 wrote:
>
> We’re scattered in actual practice
> --

This is not necessarily or always a bad thing, nor is it a problem
that can be solved by the transition to Discourse. I thought I had a
fairly good grasp of most of Fedora's activities and communities until
I saw the organizational chart posted by Marie Nordin a while back and
I realized that about a third of Fedora was terra incognita to me.
Then again, we cannot all afford the time nor do we have the skills
and proclivities required to be involved with everything. The devel ML
has been a good "firehose" of information for people who work on
packaging and development and everything tangentially tied to these.
It's only natural that the stream of information will get fragmented
down the road, but we've mostly had a "bird's eye view" of the issues
of interest to us through this channel and we could (usually) follow
up on whatever place a particular discussion unfolded, be it bugzilla,
a pagure ticket or whatever.

The "announce" ML could become an "announce" category for all things
Fedora, which might be of interest to people from different
subcommunities, while keeping it relatively low-traffic. E.g. voting
for the default wallpaper for the next Fedora release is something
that would fit that description, whereas a release party in Paraguay
or the move to Python 3.12 would not.

If the mailing lists and Discourse are being used simultaneously, we
will end up even more scattered than we are now. If the concerns
voiced so far can be addressed and 

Re: It’s time to transform the Fedora devel list into something new

[Randy Barlow via devel]

On 4/21/23 14:05, Matthew Miller wrote:

Accessiblity is important to Fedora, and I take this seriously. For
Discourse, hit the ? key to bring up the page describing keyboard shortcuts.


One thing I don't care for when it comes to web apps and keyboard 
shortcuts is that they are non-standard. When I can process 
communications in my mail client, all mail uses the same keyboard 
shortcuts, no matter which site it came from. With web apps, every web 
app has it's own keyboard shortcuts, which makes learning them all 
difficult.

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Re: It’s time to transform the Fedora devel list into something new

[Mattia Verga via devel]

Il 20/04/23 23:20, Matthew Miller ha scritto:
> It’s time to transform the Fedora devel list into something new
> ===
>
> ...
> Matthew Miller
> 
> Fedora Project Leader

I've tried to follow up all the replies this post has caused, but it
takes time to read in a foreign language and there are simply too many
posts to read them all, so I'll just go and give you some thoughts that
may have already been written by someone else.

- I'm not enthusiast of being forced to open a web browser to be noticed
about new posts. I'm aware there's a "mailing list" mode, but it's not
clear if it's perfectly usable or would be sub-optimal. I think it needs
to be tested.

- I'm also skeptical about having all mailing lists under one Discourse
category (I suppose it will be "Project Discussions") and use tags to
filter them. I think an high volume list such as devel should gone under
it's own category. Maybe for other low volumes lists which are specific
to groups or aspects can use the "tags" categorization.

- Another problem is that there are already too many tags available and
the tag description is not visible in the post submit form. I think a
new user would be confused what tag to use. I'm confused too, but that's
probably just me...

- The Discourse Android app is no use. So, again, browser on mobile or
mailing list mode.

Mattia

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Re: It’s time to transform the Fedora devel list into something new

[Kevin Fenzi]

On Sun, Apr 23, 2023 at 04:54:48PM +, Mattia Verga via devel wrote:
> Il 23/04/23 17:01, Björn Persson ha scritto:
> >
> > You let the quarrel go this far before you even bothered to mention
> > that? You're clearly not serious about selling the email features of
> > Discourse.
> >
> > You're trying to convince email users that your preferred communication
> > program is better than their preferred communication program. Users of
> > various email programs are saying no, the program I have chosen works
> > better for my needs. Do you also waste time trying to convince Emacs
> > users to switch to Vi?
> >
> > Instead of trying to make everybody use the same Javascript program,
> > what you should do is show how your preferred program implements the
> > relevant standards to be interoperable with my preferred program, so
> > that we can communicate while each using our respective programs. If
> > it's not interoperable, then that's where the problem is.
> >
> I'm not enthusiast about this proposed change too, but let's not go
> personal.

100% agreed.

> As I understand, it's not about Matthew personal preferences, it's about
> maintaining mailing list running needs manpower which Fedora is running
> out of. Switching to Discourse can probably relief some of the burden
> from fedora-infra guys.

I can't speak (or type) for Matthew, but I don't think that actually has
much to do with this. I'd love to be running a newer/better supported
mailman3 (and some folks have been hard at work to make that happen),
but even if right now today we had a super clean, well supported
mailman3 install for our lists, all the points in Matthews email would
still apply. He didn't mention mailman3 in his post at all that I can
see. I think we will be running mailing lists in some form for a long
while still, just fewer people will be interacting with them.

kevin


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Re: It’s time to transform the Fedora devel list into something new

[Kevin Fenzi]

On Sat, Apr 22, 2023 at 03:04:26PM -0700, Kevin Fenzi wrote:
> 
> So I've been using the email bridge for a while (I think since we set it
> up) and it's got it's issues for sure, but I am not sure if it's as bad
> as folks fear. 
> 
> https://discussion.fedoraproject.org/t/guide-to-interacting-with-this-site-by-email/25960
> has general info. 
> 
> I had just been dumping it into one mailbox, but today I poked at
> getting it sorted better. For those of you ancient dinosaurs like myself
> still using procmail (written in 1990!), the following hacky recipe
> works for me: 
> 
> 
> :0
> * ^List-Id: .*<\/[-a-z0-9]*\.discussion\.fedoraproject\.org>
> {
>  NAME=`echo "${MATCH}" | sed 
> 's/\.discussion\.fedoraproject\.org>$//'`
> 
>  :0
>  $HOME/Maildir/.fedora.discussion.$NAME/ 
> }
> 
> This gets posts flowing into folders by list-id, so: 
> 
> .fedora.discussion.Ask-Fedora_Ask-in-English/
> .fedora.discussion.Project-Discussion/
> 
> And of course you can filter more with the actual tags from there if you
> like. Posts should work fine as they have a reply-to hash with the
> topic/post and who the email was sent to.

One bug I hit setting this up this weekend... some (but not all) of the
categories appear to have newlines in the List-ID: header. ;( 

ie, 

List-ID: Fedora Discussion | Ask Fedora Ask in English
 

Hopefully this is a bug that can be fixed... 

So the above won't really work as the MATCH doesn't include the second
line with the actual listid in it, only the description. ;( 

kevin


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Re: It’s time to transform the Fedora devel list into something new

[Kevin Fenzi]

On Sun, Apr 23, 2023 at 05:01:53PM +0200, Björn Persson wrote:
> Matthew Miller wrote:
> > There _are_ email notifications, 
> 
> You keep talking about "notifications". I don't want a notification
> saying "somebody said something; run our Javascript program to find out
> what it was". I want the actual message delivered to my mailbox.
> 
> But some people in this thread talk as if it's possible to get the
> actual messages by email. I even see some hints that a proper tree view
> might be possible. But many others say the email features of Discourse
> are no good. The overall picture is unclear and far from convincing.

Yes, you absolutely can interact with discourse via email (mostly).
You will need to go to the website to setup things initially, but after
that you should not need to.

> > and you can interact by replying to them.
> 
> You let the quarrel go this far before you even bothered to mention
> that? You're clearly not serious about selling the email features of
> Discourse.
> 
> You're trying to convince email users that your preferred communication
> program is better than their preferred communication program. Users of
> various email programs are saying no, the program I have chosen works
> better for my needs. Do you also waste time trying to convince Emacs
> users to switch to Vi?
> 
> Instead of trying to make everybody use the same Javascript program,
> what you should do is show how your preferred program implements the
> relevant standards to be interoperable with my preferred program, so
> that we can communicate while each using our respective programs. If
> it's not interoperable, then that's where the problem is.
> 
> So how complete is Discourse's email functionality actually? Can it be
> used as a mailing list server, or not?

It can send you emails for the things you tell it you want emails and
you can sort and read and reply to them as you like.

> > Do take a look at
> > 
> > https://discussion.fedoraproject.org/t/guide-to-interacting-with-this-site-by-email/25960
> 
> Okay okay fine! I'll start up a browser in which the Javascript program
> even works and go read in the Javascript program about how I might not
> have to use the Javascript program.
> 
> So it says a "tag" is supposed to be sort of like a mailing list, but
> there's only a single global email address for starting new threads.

Yes, as noted, this is currently the setup for new threads/discussions
due to spam. Possibly some better way can be implemented.

> There's no way to send to a specific tag. Thus it's impossible to post
> to a specific mailing-list-equivalent. How am I supposed to ensure that
> my messages reach the appropriate audience?

Thats the weakest part of the setup for discourse by email right now I
think. You can easily reply to existing posts just fine. It's just new
threads/discussions that you need to either post from the web interface
or send into the one address and have some moderator tag it and approve
it.
> 
> Maybe by replying? It's rather unclear how replies by email are handled,
> but I can guess that they're given the same tag as the message they
> reply to. If that's the case, then it almost seems like they *want*
> people to reply to an irrelevant thread instead of posting a new thread.
> I suppose a more likely explanation is that the email notifications are
> meant to draw users back to the Javascript program.

You can reply to any email you get. It appears to use a reply-to thats a
hash so it knows who you are and what post/discussion you are replying
to so it can process your reply. 

> Either way, according to that post the answer is no, Discourse is not
> usable as a list server. Those who want to replace Mailman with
> Discourse should work on improving its email capabilities until it can
> be used as a list server.

Things can always be improved by "used as a list server" is not a spec
of concrete proposal for functionality. 

Anyhow, I invite you to give it a try. I am using the email gateway here
and for the most part it works fine. 

There's a bug I did hit where some of the categories seem to put \n in
List-Id: headers, which is anoying to manage, but aside from that, all
the emails come in, I can reply. We could probibly come up with some
better way to start new topics/discussions, but in the mean time either
the web interface or just sending an email and adding a 'please tag this
as #foo' should work I would think.

kevin


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Re: It’s time to transform the Fedora devel list into something new

[Mattia Verga via devel]

Il 23/04/23 17:01, Björn Persson ha scritto:
>
> You let the quarrel go this far before you even bothered to mention
> that? You're clearly not serious about selling the email features of
> Discourse.
>
> You're trying to convince email users that your preferred communication
> program is better than their preferred communication program. Users of
> various email programs are saying no, the program I have chosen works
> better for my needs. Do you also waste time trying to convince Emacs
> users to switch to Vi?
>
> Instead of trying to make everybody use the same Javascript program,
> what you should do is show how your preferred program implements the
> relevant standards to be interoperable with my preferred program, so
> that we can communicate while each using our respective programs. If
> it's not interoperable, then that's where the problem is.
>
I'm not enthusiast about this proposed change too, but let's not go
personal.

As I understand, it's not about Matthew personal preferences, it's about
maintaining mailing list running needs manpower which Fedora is running
out of. Switching to Discourse can probably relief some of the burden
from fedora-infra guys.

Mattia
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Re: It’s time to transform the Fedora devel list into something new

[Michael Catanzaro]

On Sun, Apr 23 2023 at 05:01:53 PM +0200, Björn Persson 
 wrote:

But some people in this thread talk as if it's possible to get the
actual messages by email. I even see some hints that a proper tree 
view

might be possible. But many others say the email features of Discourse
are no good. The overall picture is unclear and far from convincing.


You have to check one checkbox in settings if you want to get messages 
by mail. The mailing list mode is not amazing, but it works.


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Re: It’s time to transform the Fedora devel list into something new

[Björn Persson]

Matthew Miller wrote:
> It is also possible to enable
> new topics by email, but that's vulernable to impersonation (and spam) so
> if we enable that there probably will be a moderation step.

Email signed with OpenPGP/MIME solves the impersonation and spam
problems. A message could be allowed to bypass the moderation after it's
verified that it's signed with the correct public key for an email
address registered in a Fedora account.

DKIM also seems able to assert that a message is from a certain sender
address, although almost all usage I've seen states only a domain name.

But if those new topics can't be sent to a mailing-list-equivalent, but
just end up in some sort of "other" bucket, then it seems useless
anyway.

Björn Persson


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