[llvm-dev] RFC: Moving toward Discord and Discourse for LLVM's discussions

[Hans Wennborg via llvm-dev]

On Mon, Nov 18, 2019 at 6:18 PM David Chisnall via llvm-dev
<llvm-dev at lists.llvm.org> wrote:
>
> On 18/11/2019 17:04, Stefan Teleman via llvm-dev wrote:
> > In other words, the friction coefficient is directly proportional to
> > the verbosity of the mailing list.
>
>
> No, that is not what I said.  To get a one-off question answered on a
> mailing list, I have to:
>
> 0. Find the correct mailing list, which is not right next to the code.
> 1. Sign up.
> 2. Set up a filter for the mail that I don't care about.
> 3. Go and find the responses (hopefully my mail client does a good job
> of threading discussions - that varies a lot and most mobile ones are
> pretty bad)
> 4. Unsubscribe once my question is answered.

With a great-working mailing list, it could just be

1. Find the right list
2. Send email to it
3. Receive responses by email.

I guess it doesn't work like that today, but for me this would be the ideal.

>
> How many mailing lists are you subscribed to?  How many open source
> libraries do you use in day-to-day development?  For me, at least, the
> first is <10% of the second and I don't think I'm particularly
> unrepresentative there.
>
> Compare this to a similar flow with something like GitHub issues.  I
> already have a GitHub account and it isn't tied to a single project.  If
> a project encourages questions via their issues tracker (a lot do, and
> have a 'question' tag for them, so they build up a body of questions
> that are easy to search), then I just write the question with no login
> and get a notification via email or one of a handful of other mechanims
> if anyone replies.
>
> The second of these is a far lower investment of my time, but if that
> interaction goes well then it's the kind of thing that helps build a
> longer-term relationship with a project.  I don't know if Discord or
> GitHub issues are the correct things, but I'd recommend at least the
> following requirements:
>
>   - An easily searchable archive of past questions, ideally integrated
> with the UI for asking questions so that people asking a question get
> prompted with prior responses.
>
>   - No requirement to create an account, or at least the ability to log
> in with an account that most people already have (e.g. a GitHub account).
>
>   - An embedded notification mechanism if it takes a while for a
> response (e.g. emails for when threads that you're watching are notified).
>
> David
>
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