On 12. Mar 2020, at 18:27, Joan Touzet <woh...@apache.org> wrote:
Hi Garren, thanks for thinking ahead on this one.
On 2020-03-12 10:32, Garren Smith wrote:
Hi All,
The CouchDB slack channel has been a real success with lots of people
asking for help and getting involved. The main issue is that it is not
searchable so we often get people asking the same questions over and over.
The user mailing list is great in that sense that if you have subscribed to
it you have a searchable list of questions and answers. However, it's
really not user-friendly and judging by the fact that it has very low user
participation I'm guessing most people prefer to use slack to ask questions.
I've been really impressed with how the FoundationDB forum[1] and the rust
internal forum work [2]. I find them easy to use and really encourage
participation.
I've been having trouble getting Discourse to send me email notification when
someone follows up to my responses to a thread I didn't start. I think I've
enabled the correct settings, but it's not acting as expected. Hrm.
I do know that Discourse has a full "mailing list mode," I just haven't wanted
100% of the email from FoundationDB's forum to end up in my inbox. (I *would* want that
for user and dev@couchdb.a.o.)
I would like to propose that we move our user and dev
discussion to Discourse or a forum that works as well as Discourse. I think
that would make it really easy for users of CouchDB to look up answers to
questions and get involved in the development discussion.
I haven't checked yet, but I'm sure we could get all discourse threads to
automatically email back to the user and dev mailing list so that we still
fulfill our Apache requirements.
We'd for sure have to have everything land on the Apache CouchDB mailing lists
as well as here to meet Apache rules and regulations. And, of course,
Infrastructure is going to have to approve the move, possibly the Board as well.
With the lists still existing forever, Discourse would need to be configured to
accept email responses as well, from people emailing dev@ or user@, meaning a
*bi-directional email gateway* will likely have to be written/integrated. (I
very much doubt Infra will be willing to redirect dev@/user@ _directly_ into
Discourse.)
Thus, the bottleneck on the proposal is going to be Infrastructure's desire to
move ahead, as well as their ability to put resources on solving the
integration issues (unless you're willing to directly volunteer to help code
that up.)
Infra may, for instance, want to host Discourse themselves (if I recall
correctly, it is self-hostable), and may find some friction between that and
the nascent Pony Mail project that serves out lists.apache.org - if not
technically, from human factors.
You should, at a bare minimum, familiarise yourself with
https://lists.apache.org/list.html?d...@couchdb.apache.org and determine why it
doesn't meet our needs. A bullet-point list would be prudent; Infra is bound to
raise this as their first point.
I know its a big step away from what we're used to with our mailing lists,
but I think it would definitely open up our community.
I'm in support of the idea, but the devil's in the implementation details. Like
our efforts with git, and Slack, someone is going to have to work together with
Infra on this for a few months to make it reality. I really hope you're
volunteering to step up to that role. I certainly don't have the time.
Cheers
Garren
-Joan
[1] https://forums.foundationdb.org/
[2] https://internals.rust-lang.org/
