Re: [Summary] Discourse for Debian
On Wed, Apr 15, 2020 at 10:39:31AM -0700, Russ Allbery wrote:
> <tomas@tuxteam.de> writes:
> > On Wed, Apr 15, 2020 at 12:45:13PM +0100, Neil McGovern wrote:
>
> >> If there is sufficient pushback, I'll delete the instance, move on with
> >> my life, and conclude that no one in Debian can possibly try and
> >> innovate or do new things unless it is either:
> >> * 100% optional for people, or
> >> * made completely compatable with the old way of doing things
>
> > Oh, now. This wasn't necessary.
>
> I think it was. The amount of hostility with which Neil is being met for
> even trying something new is kind of staggering, and if I were him, I
> would be equally upset.
Hello Russ,
I don't agree with your assessment that there has been hostility against
Neil. There has been criticism - sometimes strongly worded criticism that
one might perhaps call hostility - against replacing our mailinglists by
something that quite a number of people in this thread consider worse than
the existing situation. Nothing of that has been any form of hostility
against Neil - you are IMHO assuming an ad-hominem where there is none.
> It's way easier to say no than to try to build something new.
Agreed.
> I wish people would take that into account and try to engage with what
> someone is attempting to accomplish and respect the effort that they're
> putting into trying to make Debian better, even if they don't think this
> effort will succeed.
I (and I suppose everybody else in this thread) very much respect
Neil's efforts to make Debian better, people just don't agree with the
notion that replacing mailinglists by Discourse does make Debian
better, instead quite a number of people in this thread are convinced
that it would make the situation worse instead, and that is why
emotions are going high. Implementing Discourse as an official Debian
service with the aim of replacing mailinglists isn't just adding
something new, it inevitebly means taking something away that many DDs
consider essential. This makes the situation about running Discourse
fundamentally different from e.g. running forums.debian.net.
Effectively there are three possible outcomes of introducing Discourse
as an official Debian service to handle the discussions that we
currently have on mailinglists:
- Mailinglists are shut down and everybody is forced to use Discourse.
This will leave us with a (I suppose relatively large) number of
angry and demotivated developers.
- Mailinglists and Discourse are run in parallel covering the same
topics. This would end up in a "split-brain" situation where the
people preferring mailinglists stay among themselves on the
mailinglists and the people preferring Discourse stay among
themselves on Discourse. I suppose we all agree that such a
"split-brain" situation surely wouldn't make things better for the
project.
- Everybody thinks that Discourse is the best thing to have and happily
voluntarily moves from the existing mailinglists to Discourse at
once.
Looking at the current discussion I am rather sure that the last point
is not what would happen, and each of the other two possible outcomes
would make the situation worse compared to where we are now.
Regards,
Karsten
--
Ich widerspreche hiermit ausdrücklich der Nutzung sowie der
Weitergabe meiner personenbezogenen Daten für Zwecke der Werbung
sowie der Markt- oder Meinungsforschung.
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