Hi Eduard,
This is an important discussion to have.
For me it's a question of coherence, context and convenience. The three Cs. Coherence is a factor of how well the platform integrates with the whole community and how well cross breeding of ideas can happen. Context is mostly important for developers, it's about how close the conversation is to the code (for designers, it's about how close it is to the graphics etc, etc) and convenience is the factor of how easily accessible the platform is to ALL of the people who need to have a voice in the discussion.
Some trade-off examples for us to consider; increasing convenience by using mattermost decreases coherence and context for developer questions like MacOSX packaging. Using GitLab improves context but may harm coherence if people are put off or if there are multiple subprojects, such as putting packaging in their own subprojects.
IRC actually has the least context, coherence and convenience of any platform we're on. It's okish for support, and we've been running meetings there for a long time, but it's got a lot of holes which I believe may be worth demoting it as a blessed developer discussion platform.
Launchpad for issues tracking was robbed of it's pro-context when we moved to GitLab and it's now negative in all three factors. So we really should move away from it except perhaps for issues relating to Ubuntu packaging, which may still be useful if a bit decoherant.
We're at a point in the project where I think these questions are not settled and there can be no fixed line about how the project /is/ run. But this discussion is important to have so I hope we can spark the discussion here.
Where do you think we should talk?
Best Regards, Martin Owens
On Mon, 2018-04-30 at 17:01 +0200, Eduard Braun wrote:
The (public) developer mailing list is the best place for development-related questions and that's the place where the other discussion should have been directed to. Maybe you should start copying the information you collected to a public channel where it's accessible by the community instead of requiring potential contributors to sign up just to follow the previous discussion? This way there's even a chance people could work together! As a matter of fact a colleague of mine was recently trying to build for mac, too, but hit some roadblocks - who knows if some of them could have been avoided or collectively solved if we knew about that discussion...). I'm fine if we evaluate GitLab for some project-wide discussion in future, but you should be aware, that any discussion we have in some subgroups of the GitLab project might be just as hard to discover for the wider community (how is anybody supposed to know which sub- project contains the relevant info?). At least it's public, though... Right now the officially documented communication channels are the mailing lists (and IRC for chat) - I'd prefer if we could stick to them for discussions that could be relevant to the wider community until we find a better solution (although I've yet to see the discussion on why we even want to drop our mailing list discussions while Ian is actively working on providing us with a future proof mailman setup [1]).