Talk:OpenSource-Dev

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Mailing list etiquette?

As of this moment, there are 387 subscribers to the sldev mailing list. As you would expect with a big public mailing list, most of those people don't post to the list. Of course, a handful of people post a lot. That's ok; if you have something to say, you should say it. However, I also want to make sure that if someone has something to say that everyone needs to read, that it gets read. If there's too much to sort through, that might not happen.

We've discussed the idea that we should split off separate mailing lists. In particular, there are two different proposals:

• sldev-contributors - for those that have signed contribution agreements (MISC-30)
• sldev-policy - for legal and policy issues (MISC-44)

I've resisted going down that path, because I think that the groupings we want are going to be more fluid than is practical to keep up with (one day we'll want to split off policy, the next day we'll want to split off caching discussions, etc).

I'd like to keep things almost the way that they are, but introduce new guidelines:

• If a topic generates more than five replies in less than 24 hours, it's time to redirect that conversation to one of our other tools, either the wiki or the bug tracker.
• If the topic is not specifically a Second Life development-related topic (e.g. this email, or a licensing discussion), it should be redirected to the wiki or the bug tracker immediately. One post per 48 hours should be sufficient to bring it to everyone's attention.
• If after 48 hours, the topic seems to have died out on the alternate forum, it's ok to reraise the issue on this mailing list, summarizing the offlist conversation thusfar, and calling for further comment in the alternate forum.

I think this policy strikes a good balance between making sure that people have a large forum to raise and discuss a broad spectrum of issues, while at the same time ensuring that the list doesn't become overwhelmed with discussion on a single topic that may not be of interest to everyone on the list.

Thoughts? -- Rob Linden 10:26, 23 March 2007 (PDT)

As for the the topics that have done this (moved to the wiki or jira), they have been very successful. I second. Dzonatas Sol 21:31, 23 March 2007 (PDT)

Email is obviously a bad idea, but jira/wiki is worse. Forums are the obvious answer to anyone - unless your goal is to put road blocks up before discussion (which certainly makes sense when you want to keep the community from organizing), in which case I suppose this all make sense.

Jira is for bug reports. Wiki pages are great for documents detailing focused ideas, such as wikipedia entries. But having a dialogue between participants is not what they are meant for. There are no threads, no way to filter, rate participants and find new discussion. The only goal seems to be, as I said above, to keep the community from discussing coherently among themselves.

What LL is looking for here, let's face it, are people to contribute to their open source project without giving up some kind of control to the community. I'm sure that makes sense to some people around here, but it makes zero sense to me.

I (and I am sure many others) have avoided contributing to opensim simply because we've been waiting for LL to come around and realise that they need to work with us as a community and not as people to do their singular bidding. In some ways, opensl is becoming a threat to us all, not the opportunity LL wants to make it out to be. The only way to deal with that threat seems to be to work with the opensim crowd and wrench control away rather than work with Linden Lab.

Is this really what you guys wanted? It certainly isn't what I want. It puts at risk everything I (and everyone else) have tried to build (and we've built a lot for SL. Far more than 95% of your so called open source developers) in secondlife.. but so is the whole direction you're going with OpenSL.

It's a question of picking our masters - the freedom BSD folks or the "you must GPL everything and you can only talk in jira or wiki folks."

Pick your poison, I guess. -- Iron Perth

I don't know why you feel that way so strongly. It is obvious that as an outside developer that communication won't be as easy as being an internal employee. However, there are still features like the Technical Talk area on the forums. Jira issues can easily have forums attached to them; however, the forums are limited to premium users.

E-Mail is great. The best forum is the modern threaded e-mail unless you are stuck with hotmail or yahoo.

I'm on a dozen of mail-lists for different projects. SLDev is actually pretty quiet compared to the others, yet the others have "user" lists for the various discussions. Dzonatas Sol 21:28, 23 March 2007 (PDT)

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I would not object to adding forums as an acceptable conversation redirect target. The reason for directing this conversations to the wiki or jira is to help the community organize. There is no conspiracy here. I prefer using a wiki talk page so the discussion for a topic is attached directly to the topic itself. So, when newcomers read about a new topic (such as a feature design or these guidelines), they can quickly access the debate about what went into shaping the content of the main page.

However, if you feel more strongly about using a forum instead, that's fine too. I personally don't think it'll be as effective as the wiki, but I don't mind seeing different experiments. The point is to avoid having huge conversations on the mailing list where no one tries to summarize or capture key ideas. If the goal is discussion for discussion's sake, the status quo would have been just fine. However, I'm assuming that the community wants to accomplish something, so I'm trying to help.

As I also said before, I think it's fine to raise a topic after a couple of days if the conversation died down before reaching a resolution. I would hope that before reraising it to 380+ people, that someone take the time to actually summarize the conversation and document forward progress. I don't think it's exclusively Linden Lab employees that would appreciate the courtesy. -- Rob Linden 23:49, 23 March 2007 (PDT)

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I'm not sure if I like this change all that much so far. Moving conversations to the wiki makes things less convenient to discuss, IMO. Now instead of watching my inbox, I've got to use a RSS reader, and subscribe to the feed, but that includes not only the sldev discussion, but also completely unrelated changes such as LSL stuff, and typo corrections. That makes it more effort to keep up with, not less.

Additionally, there's a loss of functionality in that editing a wiki is less convenient than email. Quoting is harder, formatting requires knowing the wiki syntax with all its conventions, the Editing help link leads to a page that's nearly blank, the option of CCing people or not sending a message to the discussion list doesn't exist anymore (maybe userpages, but that's public), and adding something to a wiki requires previewing it first to make sure formatting came out right. There's also the potential problem of conflicting changes to the same page. Also, for some reason, my RSS reader keeps telling me about new entries from yesterday (what's up with that?) that don't appear as the more recent entry, but somewhere in the middle of my list. RSS also slows discussions down, as checking it too frequently places extra load on the server, while IMAP has new mail notification.

IMO, all of these things are great when they're used for their intended purpose. Mailing lists are good for discussions, keep them for that. Wikis are good for collaborative documetation, but not all that great for discussing. Jira is definitely the right place for bug reporting, but I don't like the idea of discussing anything there. Jira is currently slow, requires logging in, has usability problems (login bug) and doesn't seem to have any sort of reply notification that I can see. -- —The preceding unsigned comment was added by Dale Glass

Just had such a 'potential conflict'. Having to merge when wanting to discuss, is, ... well, ... kinda odd. -- Boroondas Gupte 16:21, 25 March 2007 (PDT)

Deep linking to conversations

Summaries are a fine thing. But, even if a discussion has died out for some while and so was replaced by its summary, you might sometimes wish to search for some single contribution and, once you found it, refer to it. Doing so by links to wiki-diffs of the discussion page's history will be a pain. Is there some better way to do it? I know the question is rather hypothetical right now and could be asked when the problem actually arises, but I think its relevant for the decision of what topic to redirect to what media. -- Boroondas Gupte 16:16, 25 March 2007 (PDT)

One way to do it is how I've just done it. Split the conversation into its own thread (with title) and link to it. That means potentially redirecting the context of a quote (admittedly dangerous), but you get a link you can use (e.g. https://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/Talk:SLDev#Deep%20linking%20to%20conversations ) -- Rob Linden 17:59, 25 March 2007 (PDT)

Can things stay organized on a wiki?

Although I see the problems of a high traffic mailing list, I share Iron's concerns. Up to now, people discussing on the wiki were very persistent in keeping things formatted and signing their contributions, so you can still see the threads in some way. But can we keep this up as the community is growing? Perhaps someone's got a good idea how this can be made easier, by e.g. a wiki-template generating some thread/tree-like structures with some easy way to answer to a single node.

To ease tracking all discussions on the wiki derived from the mailing list, we could put them in a common category. Any ideas how to name such category? Can someone think of an equivalent for the forums, for jira and the other media where discussions might be redirected to? -- Boroondas Gupte 16:16, 25 March 2007 (PDT)

I took the liberty of breaking this into it's own thread, too. I remember hearing about threaded discussions for MediaWiki last year at the Wikimania Hacking Days. I'm not sure if any production-quality software emerged. If someone finds a plugin we can use, I'll look into it (no promises, since I want to make sure I'm introducing something I can commit to support for a while).

Even without dedicated software, I think the answer is "yes, we can stay organized", or perhaps "yes, we need to stay organized to be effective". It's one thing to make it easy for people writing; more importantly, we all need to make things easy for whoever is going to write the code. I suspect that a lot of people here have the best intentions, and all have valuable opinions of how it should be done, but it won't matter if this dies down a month from now unless this conversation is in a format that can be easily read and digested. I think what we've created here so far is far more readable than a long mailing list thread.

Re: category for discussions, I've created a template that I added to this page ({{Open Source Talk Page}}). Please add this talk page to any page you think the group should keep track of this way. -- Rob Linden 18:32, 25 March 2007 (PDT)

I'm starting to doubt that. Honestly, the more I use this, the less I like it. Strife has just put Paula's name on something I wrote for some reason, for instance. I'm sure it's a mistake, but really all of this is extra inconvenience for pretty much no gain. Monitoring it is inconvenient. I'm seeing my RSS reader report the same change multiple times now. Now I'm also seeing that I've got to keep watching the page where I wrote something to make sure that what I said isn't misattributed or misrepresented, and that I didn't forget to sign it. Such things aren't a problem for say, documenting LSL, where there shouldn't be such a thing as content ownership in the first place, but it's not good for having a discussion. I can't even be sure that if I decide to forget about this for a few weeks I'll be able to find what I said in the place where I left it. For all I know it might be moved to another section, be archived somewhere, deleted, or moved to another page.

None of these problems even existed on the mailing list. What I say there will stay in the same place where I wrote it, in the same context, in my exact wording, signed with my GPG key. And there's no reason why I a link to my post from the archive today shouldn't remain valid several years later. Besides, this moving around clearly means that we're already starting to compensate for the deficiencies of the Wiki when used for this purpose. And why are we using a tool that creates extra work instead of avoiding it? Dale Glass 19:08, 25 March 2007 (PDT)

I don't agree with this use of ":" to thread discussion on the talk page. I only use it if it is how the page flows. I suggest to use a template for talk pages that would reformat someones message to look similar to the SL forums "boxed" style. Then we could just wrap our messages up in the template and direct people to use that. Dzonatas Sol 19:25, 25 March 2007 (PDT)

Easier for writers vs. easier for readers

Okay, I guess things aren't as peachy as I'd hoped. However, I'd like to keep this experiment going for a couple of weeks. In spite of the extra overhead, I think that the result will be something that people will be much more likely to read down the road. I'm assuming that everyone here is writing because they want others to read what they've written (rather than for some therapeutic purpose). In that regard, I believe this method is more effective than the old way. If after two weeks, if I'm the only one who likes this way of doing things, we'll figure out something new.

I have to make clear, though, I really don't think the old status quo was working. I think there was probably a couple dozen really keeping up, and a lot of people who would only read selected messages. I got the sense that some people were trying to dominate the conversation by being the fastest to respond, rather than the most deliberative.

Using the wiki as a talk mechanism, I think others a month or two down the road will be much more willing to read the entire Talk:Texture cache page from start to finish, and absorb the arguments. Whatever replacement we have for this mechanism needs to have similar characteristics. I'm not suggesting we abolish the mailing list for discussion altogether, but rather, just use the wiki when dealing with a hot topic. Let's channel the energy and passion that people have toward the topic to make sure that we end up with a document of lasting value, instead of an endless thread tucked away in a mailing list archive that someone may find when they plug "texture cache" into their favorite search engine (and, which, even if they find it, they may have no desire to read because it's just too much).

Re: Dale's concern about PGP signatures. I agree that mailing lists are much more effective for PGP sigs. The wiki does at least have the advantage of a complete audit log, but PGP sigs are better. Nonetheless, I think you'll find that getting in the habit of signing comments isn't that tough -- Rob Linden 22:58, 25 March 2007 (PDT)