I'm on the fence. It's used extensively in Lucene. We also log it, or at least the dev channel. It's a boon for the "full time" devs out there. For the rest of us, I'm undecided.
On the plus side, you get real time interaction. You also get some fun banter from time to time w/ friends. On the down side, I think it takes away the opportunity for people to contribute to discussions asynchronously, as there is a tendency to discuss on IRC, plop it in JIRA and then put in the patch/fix/etc. This is great if you are the one doing the work, but it's not so great if you missed the conversation. I think the big issue maybe is simply that the logs from IRC aren't part of the normal mailing list workflow. Sometimes, you also get less thoughtful answers b/c email forces you to write down your thoughts/responses whereas IRC is more on the fly. I'm not against it, but, at a minimum, keep in mind that if a "decision" is made there, it should be captured and put in JIRA and there should still be time allotted for it to ruminate in JIRA (It is common courtesy anyway, for big stuff, to give warnings like: "I'm going to commit this in 3 days unless I hear otherwise") so that others who aren't on IRC have a chance to discuss it. (See http://lucene.apache.org/java/docs/irc.html -- see http://colabti.org/irclogger/irclogger_logs/lucene-dev). That kind of covers the dev side. On the user side, there is a huge benefit for discussions to be on the mailing list here as I think most people's workflow, plus Google, etc. make it easy to lookup past answers. That being said, most users in Lucene land don't use the IRC channels for questions. It's more a dev hangout. At the end of the day, I guess I'd say let's put it up on the wiki along w/ the mailing lists so that people know where it is and let's keep an eye out for some of the telltale signs of it siphoning off good community interaction and then make adjustments as appropriate. -Grant On Aug 30, 2011, at 2:56 PM, Sebastian Schelter wrote: > I like the idea too, I'll start idling a little in the chat. We should find a > way to protocol the discussions there to make the knowledge gained available > later. > > --sebastian > > On 30.08.2011 15:42, Dan Brickley wrote: >> On 30 August 2011 15:17, Dhruv Kumar<[email protected]> wrote: >>> Interesting indeed! >>> >>> On Tue, Aug 30, 2011 at 9:06 AM, Ted Dunning<[email protected]> wrote: >>> >>>> Interesting. I didn't know about the IRC channel. The hbase group uses >>>> IRC extensively. >> >> In the RDF scene we've had #swig (previously #rdfig) in continuous use >> for about a decade. It's not easy getting critical mass, but we found >> having logs and a few tools really helped with the timezone-aspects >> (see http://chatlogs.planetrdf.com/rdfig/2001.html >> http://chatlogs.planetrdf.com/swig/ and nearby). >> >> Freenode don't seem to offer logging tools out-of-the-box but there is >> at least a reasonable Web-based client http://webchat.freenode.net/ >> >> Dan >
