On Mon, 29 Oct 2018 20:11:04 +0000
"Marti Bolivar" <marti@...> wrote:

[]

Slack is a proprietary de facto standard in this context, at least in
the west.

Love that argument. So, perhaps we shouldn't look for easy ways and
embrace diversity in general, and look for WeChat that you mentioned or
QQ?

From Carles next mail:

IRC is not only a tool for core contributors, maintainers and TSC
members, but also users of the RTOS. The sentence “oh, but IRC still
*exists*” has come up too many times in the last few months while
introducing engineers to the Zephyr project.

That's actually very good comment. Trying to close my eyes and
make a reminiscence of that, following comes out of me: "There's an
idea to make a *support* channel on Slack for all the "IRC lives??"
people." Sounds great, and especially that there're people who want to
do support both on IRC and elsewhere.

The more dissemination we have, the better. Just randomly searched for
"zephyr rtos" (no hope for just "zephyr") on Reddit, and
disappointedly, #1 hit is still the post for 1.9 release I made a
year ago. If we can't make semi-regular posts on popular IT crowd sites
like Reddit, let's at least create a Slack channel. Or can do both
actually. Or all of them:

1. Development channel on IRC
2. I believe there is/was something like #zephyr-bluetooth on IRC too.
I never understood why, but I heard there was.
3. Slack channel.
4. Reddit subreddit
... more

but I think we
ought to be honest with ourselves that this is really what we are
arguing about.

[]

--
Best Regards,
Paul

Linaro.org | Open source software for ARM SoCs
Follow Linaro: http://www.facebook.com/pages/Linaro
http://twitter.com/#!/linaroorg - http://www.linaro.org/linaro-blog

Hi Paul,

On Mon, 29 Oct 2018 21:58:22 +0000
Marti Bolivar <marti@...> wrote:

[]

Slack is a proprietary de facto standard in this context, at
least in the west.

Love that argument. So, perhaps we shouldn't look for easy ways and
embrace diversity in general, and look for WeChat that you
mentioned or QQ?

This sentence is hard to parse, but I suspect you (and Flavio) have
both missed my point, which was that if you're talking about
"everyone's" favorite chat clients by raw number of users, IRC
integration is basically non-existent. So claiming that as a plus
seems bogus.

I personally never talked about "favorite chat clients" or something. I
just calmly use mine, based on the projects' requirements, and those
requirements for last 10-15 years were consistent - IRC (so yes, I
had to acquire my favorite IRC client, etc.). Now requirements seem to
change, so I'm just trying to understand why, and make sure that if
change is made, no improvement opportunities are missed or hasty
decisions are made, like trading "east" for "west", etc.

[]

The more dissemination we have, the better. Just randomly searched
for "zephyr rtos" (no hope for just "zephyr") on Reddit, and
disappointedly, #1 hit is still the post for 1.9 release I made a
year ago. If we can't make semi-regular posts on popular IT crowd
sites like Reddit, let's at least create a Slack channel. Or can do
both actually. Or all of them:

1. Development channel on IRC
2. I believe there is/was something like #zephyr-bluetooth on IRC
too. I never understood why, but I heard there was.
3. Slack channel.
4. Reddit subreddit
... more

So "do all the things"?

Yes, and weekly summaries of Zephyr changes too. Why not?

For one, I hope there won't be external directives where to go,
especially represented as a "community decision". (Note that I
personally happy to follow any project requirements, especially if
it's clear where they originate from and what are their purpose.)

but I think we
ought to be honest with ourselves that this is really what we are
arguing about.

[]

Since you deleted most of the rest of the context in this thread so
far, I'm not sure what including the above followed by "[]" means.

That's easy: "[]" is a common placeholder for deleted text; there was
a complaint that quoting of the thread was broken, moreover I don't
think that every participant of such threads should comment every
point of other participants, a couple of important is enough, or
discussion get unwieldy. Finally, I really appreciate your call to be
honest with ourselves of what we're arguing about, so I tried to say in
fair manner what I think about these matters.

Thanks,
Marti

[]

--
Best Regards,
Paul

Linaro.org | Open source software for ARM SoCs
Follow Linaro: http://www.facebook.com/pages/Linaro
http://twitter.com/#!/linaroorg - http://www.linaro.org/linaro-blog

On Mon, 29 Oct 2018 22:08:55 +0000
"Cufi, Carles" <Carles.Cufi@...> wrote:

Hi Paul,

[]

For what is worth, I (relatively) regularly comment and post on
Reddit about Zephyr. On r/embedded to be precise, but also on other
subreddits.

Great to know, you must be <...> then ;-) (Well, nick is skipped for
privacy reasons).

1. Development channel on IRC
2. I believe there is/was something like #zephyr-bluetooth on IRC
too. I never understood why, but I heard there was.
3. Slack channel.
4. Reddit subreddit
... more

Not sure if I get this, but I think you are suggesting we combine
both IRC and Slack. While I don't think that's the greatest of
situations to find ourselves in, I would have no problem using both
(I already do in fact). But then we'd need the devs to also frequent
the Slack channel, otherwise it'd be a bit pointless.

Right, and besides that "potentially pointless" situation (or more
specifically, depending on the goodwill of developers), there 2 other
choices: don't change anything, let it work like it worked for decades,
people who need will find their way on IRC. Or, forcibly move everyone
elsewhere.

I'm curious which route will be taken. But I'm sure that whichever
will, it will be for the greater good of the project.

Anyway, while that was the more controversial point in Anas' email, I
guess the most *important* is upcoming PR/patch process changes. So, I
guess I'll wait for more info on that part from now on. (But I do hope
that more people will cast their "votes" of IRC vs non-IRC matter yet.)

Carles

--
Best Regards,
Paul

Linaro.org | Open source software for ARM SoCs
Follow Linaro: http://www.facebook.com/pages/Linaro
http://twitter.com/#!/linaroorg - http://www.linaro.org/linaro-blog

[]

1. Development channel on IRC
2. I believe there is/was something like #zephyr-bluetooth on IRC
too. I never understood why, but I heard there was.
3. Slack channel.

4. Reddit subreddit

... more

Not sure if I get this, but I think you are suggesting we combine both
IRC and Slack. While I don't think that's the greatest of situations
to find ourselves in, I would have no problem using both (I already do
in fact). But then we'd need the devs to also frequent the Slack
channel, otherwise it'd be a bit pointless.

Right, and besides that "potentially pointless" situation (or more specifically, depending on the goodwill of developers), there 2 other
choices: don't change anything, let it work like it worked for decades, people who need will find their way on IRC. Or, forcibly move everyone elsewhere.

Isn't there a 3rd option which does require some more work than the other two other options and that is to have both slack and IRC while mirroring the channels from IRC to slack with an IRC-slack bridge[0](sort of like this but you could make it more advanced)? At least that's what we did when we migrated to slack on another project I worked on. That way devs don't have to frequent slack as it's optional but a nice addition.

One of the big pain points I've had with these bridges is however if the slack-IRC bot disconnects for some reason you'll lose history synchronisation between the sides, also there is maintenance and upkeep. So someone has to be responsible for making sure it's alive and kicking at least. Another problem I've faced is that the bridge does not support threading so if people start a discussion in a thread on slack, this will be lost on IRC. Maybe some newer bridges have support for this.

At least the problems I see with IRC at this point is that if you are not connected continuously (paying for web-based clients) or running on your own server, you'll lose history. This can be mitigated with an IRC bot where you could /msg history or public logs, but I don't see either in the project at the moment. Maybe I'm looking in the wrong place [1]?

I'm curious which route will be taken. But I'm sure that whichever will, it will be for the greater good of the project.

Anyway, while that was the more controversial point in Anas' email, I guess the most *important* is upcoming PR/patch process changes. So, I guess I'll wait for more info on that part from now on. (But I do hope that more people will cast their "votes" of IRC vs non-IRC matter yet.)

So I'll cast my "vote" right in the middle and ask for the consideration of having both with an integration in between them where you mirror the channels to slack(this way you could also see which channels are being used). I also think these kinds of bridges exists for gitter. This will also give new developers/users from a younger age group or those who are inexperienced with IRC a lower barrier of entry and maybe they'll eventually migrate over to IRC or visa versa.

[0] https://github.com/ekmartin/slack-irc
[1] https://freenode.irclog.whitequark.org/