[Discussion] mailing list alternative

Hey swifters,
  I would like to (re)open up discussion on moving away from email for the
swift evolution mailing list. I know this has probably been discussed
before but it really should be addressed again. I wouldn't even know how to
find if it has been discussed before because it would be too hard to go
back through the history.

The main factors to move away from email is because email may deter
newcomers, history, and threads. I may be speaking for myself when saying
email may intimidate newcomers from expressing their opinions and thoughts.
It is hard to know what has already been discussed and who is even in the
active conversation. Keeping track of history is a pain as well. Searching
through many emails to find who said what and when is not effective in
email clients. Also, code formatting in emails is not effective. Let's
discuss and actually make an action to move away from email if the
community so agrees. Of course, recommendations are Slack, Hipchat (-1),
and Gitter.

···

--
Joshua Alvarado
alvaradojoshua0@gmail.com

+1 for Discourse. Cannot wait any longer for this to happen.

···

--
Adrian Zubarev
Sent with Airmail

Am 23. Januar 2017 um 17:18:42, Joshua Alvarado via swift-evolution (swift-evolution@swift.org) schrieb:

Hey swifters,
I would like to (re)open up discussion on moving away from email for the swift evolution mailing list. I know this has probably been discussed before but it really should be addressed again. I wouldn't even know how to find if it has been discussed before because it would be too hard to go back through the history.

The main factors to move away from email is because email may deter newcomers, history, and threads. I may be speaking for myself when saying email may intimidate newcomers from expressing their opinions and thoughts. It is hard to know what has already been discussed and who is even in the active conversation. Keeping track of history is a pain as well. Searching through many emails to find who said what and when is not effective in email clients. Also, code formatting in emails is not effective. Let's discuss and actually make an action to move away from email if the community so agrees. Of course, recommendations are Slack, Hipchat (-1), and Gitter.

--
Joshua Alvarado
alvaradojoshua0@gmail.com
_______________________________________________
swift-evolution mailing list
swift-evolution@swift.org
https://lists.swift.org/mailman/listinfo/swift-evolution

I agree with you, but those recommendations are chat clients, which sound even worse than email for the kind of discussions we have had on the mailing list.

Discourse is my pick.

···

On 23 Jan 2017, at 17:02, Joshua Alvarado via swift-evolution <swift-evolution@swift.org> wrote:

Hey swifters,
  I would like to (re)open up discussion on moving away from email for the swift evolution mailing list. I know this has probably been discussed before but it really should be addressed again. I wouldn't even know how to find if it has been discussed before because it would be too hard to go back through the history.

The main factors to move away from email is because email may deter newcomers, history, and threads. I may be speaking for myself when saying email may intimidate newcomers from expressing their opinions and thoughts. It is hard to know what has already been discussed and who is even in the active conversation. Keeping track of history is a pain as well. Searching through many emails to find who said what and when is not effective in email clients. Also, code formatting in emails is not effective. Let's discuss and actually make an action to move away from email if the community so agrees. Of course, recommendations are Slack, Hipchat (-1), and Gitter.

--
Joshua Alvarado
alvaradojoshua0@gmail.com
_______________________________________________
swift-evolution mailing list
swift-evolution@swift.org
https://lists.swift.org/mailman/listinfo/swift-evolution

I too had to create an additional email account for Swift Evolution. And
ended up removing it from Mail.app after a week, due to pure exhaustion.
It's just overwhelming.

The fact that Swift's official channels require me signing up to a firehose
and the fact that previous discussions on mailing lists are pretty much
undiscoverable (list archives feel like stuck in the 90s when it comes to
usability) has been the main factor deterring me from contributing to the
Swift language or stdlib. It is just way too much a hassle.

I'm not getting paid to work on Swift, so I make conscious choices on what
to invest my personal time in. Mailing lists are not on that list. Same for
JIRA. The convoluted user interface and bad performance of JIRA has been a
major factor for me not filing more bugs. This plus the fact that Jira
(last time I checked) doesn't support Swift highlighting and doesn't have
half-decent support for unicode.

The "personal time" aspect is a big one, imho. For somebody being paid to
work with a certain infrastructure it's easy to come to the conclusion that
it "works for me" even if the experience is far from optimal. For somebody
however who has to make the decision of whether or not to invest precious
personal time into a system that's simply a pain in the rear, things like
these become much more critical.

I agree 100% on this:
https://lists.swift.org/pipermail/swift-evolution/Week-of-Mon-20170123/030867.html

I would like to propose moving all official discussion (and especially the
"final comment period" stuff) to Github. I actually baffles me that this
hasn't been proposed yet. It's kind of the obvious choice, no? Or maybe I'm
just biased as a (Swift &) Rust user.

Rust has a dedicated repo for RFCs: GitHub - rust-lang/rfcs: RFCs for changes to Rust

Currently there are over 600 open issues being discussed (over 300 closed),
as well as over 60 open PRs (over 850 closed).

It works beautifully.

You get Markdown-formatted proposals, Markdown-formatted comments,
"Emotions" for giving "+1" feedback without spamming the entire list,
selective watching on a per-issue level. Issues, PRs and discussions are
well integrated. Issues/PRs can have tags for easy filtering. You're
interested in libs? Filter by "T-libs" tag. I could go on and on…

As a result of all this I'm a casual contributor to Rust (as in actual
commits) and its RFCs (as in Github comments), while I just can't be
bothered to do the same for Swift right now. It's just no fun. Make it fun
and I'll be on board the next day. And I'm probably not gonna be alone on
this general stance.

I would like to encourage those responsible at Apple to take a serious look
at how Rust handles these things.
Heck, why not just get in contact with their community team (
Governance - Rust Programming Language) and ask them for
recommendations based on their experience? Or just ask Graydon, Gankro or
Huonh at Apple, who themselves used to be center-stage members of the Rust
core community?

Ceterum censeo Mailman et Jira sunt delendam.

Vincent

Ps: I would give a clear -1 for any kind of chat system as those are
horrible for archiving.

···

On Mon, Jan 23, 2017 at 5:02 PM, Joshua Alvarado via swift-evolution < swift-evolution@swift.org> wrote:

Hey swifters,
  I would like to (re)open up discussion on moving away from email for the
swift evolution mailing list. I know this has probably been discussed
before but it really should be addressed again. I wouldn't even know how to
find if it has been discussed before because it would be too hard to go
back through the history.

The main factors to move away from email is because email may deter
newcomers, history, and threads. I may be speaking for myself when saying
email may intimidate newcomers from expressing their opinions and thoughts.
It is hard to know what has already been discussed and who is even in the
active conversation. Keeping track of history is a pain as well. Searching
through many emails to find who said what and when is not effective in
email clients. Also, code formatting in emails is not effective. Let's
discuss and actually make an action to move away from email if the
community so agrees. Of course, recommendations are Slack, Hipchat (-1),
and Gitter.

--
Joshua Alvarado
alvaradojoshua0@gmail.com

_______________________________________________
swift-evolution mailing list
swift-evolution@swift.org
https://lists.swift.org/mailman/listinfo/swift-evolution

There has been a tremendous amount of participation on this thread, with some extremely thoughtful analysis of how the mailing list serves the community and the tradeoffs of moving to a forum, like Discourse.

I've been thinking about the points made on this thread as well as looking at the experimental Discourse setup that Nate Cook provided. While there are tradeoffs with moving swift-evolution to Discourse, I think the benefits outweigh the negatives.

After discussing this with the Core Team, the decision is to move swift-evolution and swift-users to Discourse. I will also bring it up for discussion on the -dev mailing lists to do the same there, so that we all are using consistent infrastructure.

No rollout plan has been established yet. People are busy, and there are a variety of logistics to figure out. My intent is to engage with a handful of people across the community on helping with the transition, including making sure we configure Discourse properly so we have the best experience for those who want to continue to use email. We also want to import the history of the mailing list as well so that we do not lose valuable conversation. As a rollout plan gets figured out it will get communicated.

I realize that many people aren't following this thread anymore, so I'll send out a separate email just so people don't miss the decision. Thank you all to EVERYONE who participated in this thread and expressed an opinion.

Ted

···

On Jan 23, 2017, at 8:02 AM, Joshua Alvarado via swift-evolution <swift-evolution@swift.org> wrote:

Hey swifters,
  I would like to (re)open up discussion on moving away from email for the swift evolution mailing list. I know this has probably been discussed before but it really should be addressed again. I wouldn't even know how to find if it has been discussed before because it would be too hard to go back through the history.

The main factors to move away from email is because email may deter newcomers, history, and threads. I may be speaking for myself when saying email may intimidate newcomers from expressing their opinions and thoughts. It is hard to know what has already been discussed and who is even in the active conversation. Keeping track of history is a pain as well. Searching through many emails to find who said what and when is not effective in email clients. Also, code formatting in emails is not effective. Let's discuss and actually make an action to move away from email if the community so agrees. Of course, recommendations are Slack, Hipchat (-1), and Gitter.

--
Joshua Alvarado
alvaradojoshua0@gmail.com
_______________________________________________
swift-evolution mailing list
swift-evolution@swift.org
https://lists.swift.org/mailman/listinfo/swift-evolution

Mobile support would be a must have. I love that Disclosure has good mobile support.

Also Slack has added threads and would be a very helpful feature in the way proposals are discussed here.

Alvarado, Joshua

···

On Jan 23, 2017, at 9:22 AM, Adrian Zubarev <adrian.zubarev@devandartist.com> wrote:

+1 for Discourse. Cannot wait any longer for this to happen.

--
Adrian Zubarev
Sent with Airmail

Am 23. Januar 2017 um 17:18:42, Joshua Alvarado via swift-evolution (swift-evolution@swift.org) schrieb:

Hey swifters,
  I would like to (re)open up discussion on moving away from email for the swift evolution mailing list. I know this has probably been discussed before but it really should be addressed again. I wouldn't even know how to find if it has been discussed before because it would be too hard to go back through the history.

The main factors to move away from email is because email may deter newcomers, history, and threads. I may be speaking for myself when saying email may intimidate newcomers from expressing their opinions and thoughts. It is hard to know what has already been discussed and who is even in the active conversation. Keeping track of history is a pain as well. Searching through many emails to find who said what and when is not effective in email clients. Also, code formatting in emails is not effective. Let's discuss and actually make an action to move away from email if the community so agrees. Of course, recommendations are Slack, Hipchat (-1), and Gitter.

--
Joshua Alvarado
alvaradojoshua0@gmail.com
_______________________________________________
swift-evolution mailing list
swift-evolution@swift.org
https://lists.swift.org/mailman/listinfo/swift-evolution

As long as we are pretending this bike shed is getting painted again…

I would actually prefer something closer to an issue tracker than discourse. We get a lot of repeat and diverging topics, and it would be nice to mark discussions as related, duplicates, etc

-DW

···

On Jan 23, 2017, at 9:22 AM, Adrian Zubarev via swift-evolution <swift-evolution@swift.org> wrote:

+1 for Discourse <http://www.discourse.org/&gt;\. Cannot wait any longer for this to happen.

--
Adrian Zubarev
Sent with Airmail

Am 23. Januar 2017 um 17:18:42, Joshua Alvarado via swift-evolution (swift-evolution@swift.org <mailto:swift-evolution@swift.org>) schrieb:

Hey swifters,
  I would like to (re)open up discussion on moving away from email for the swift evolution mailing list. I know this has probably been discussed before but it really should be addressed again. I wouldn't even know how to find if it has been discussed before because it would be too hard to go back through the history.

The main factors to move away from email is because email may deter newcomers, history, and threads. I may be speaking for myself when saying email may intimidate newcomers from expressing their opinions and thoughts. It is hard to know what has already been discussed and who is even in the active conversation. Keeping track of history is a pain as well. Searching through many emails to find who said what and when is not effective in email clients. Also, code formatting in emails is not effective. Let's discuss and actually make an action to move away from email if the community so agrees. Of course, recommendations are Slack, Hipchat (-1), and Gitter.

--
Joshua Alvarado
alvaradojoshua0@gmail.com <mailto:alvaradojoshua0@gmail.com>_______________________________________________
swift-evolution mailing list
swift-evolution@swift.org
https://lists.swift.org/mailman/listinfo/swift-evolution

_______________________________________________
swift-evolution mailing list
swift-evolution@swift.org <mailto:swift-evolution@swift.org>
https://lists.swift.org/mailman/listinfo/swift-evolution

It will be painted! ;)

So far we have:
+2 Disclosure
+1 Slack
+1 Issue tracker

Let's really get everyone's opinions and see if we can get this rock rolling towards a better solution. Of course it will be Apple's choice in the end but we can give a voice on the matter to show we do care about moving over.

Alvarado, Joshua

···

On Jan 23, 2017, at 10:55 AM, David Waite <david@alkaline-solutions.com> wrote:

As long as we are pretending this bike shed is getting painted again…

I would actually prefer something closer to an issue tracker than discourse. We get a lot of repeat and diverging topics, and it would be nice to mark discussions as related, duplicates, etc

-DW

On Jan 23, 2017, at 9:22 AM, Adrian Zubarev via swift-evolution <swift-evolution@swift.org> wrote:

+1 for Discourse. Cannot wait any longer for this to happen.

--
Adrian Zubarev
Sent with Airmail

Am 23. Januar 2017 um 17:18:42, Joshua Alvarado via swift-evolution (swift-evolution@swift.org) schrieb:

Hey swifters,
  I would like to (re)open up discussion on moving away from email for the swift evolution mailing list. I know this has probably been discussed before but it really should be addressed again. I wouldn't even know how to find if it has been discussed before because it would be too hard to go back through the history.

The main factors to move away from email is because email may deter newcomers, history, and threads. I may be speaking for myself when saying email may intimidate newcomers from expressing their opinions and thoughts. It is hard to know what has already been discussed and who is even in the active conversation. Keeping track of history is a pain as well. Searching through many emails to find who said what and when is not effective in email clients. Also, code formatting in emails is not effective. Let's discuss and actually make an action to move away from email if the community so agrees. Of course, recommendations are Slack, Hipchat (-1), and Gitter.

--
Joshua Alvarado
alvaradojoshua0@gmail.com
_______________________________________________
swift-evolution mailing list
swift-evolution@swift.org
https://lists.swift.org/mailman/listinfo/swift-evolution

_______________________________________________
swift-evolution mailing list
swift-evolution@swift.org
https://lists.swift.org/mailman/listinfo/swift-evolution

Obligatory prior discussion sheds, er, I mean threads:

https://lists.swift.org/pipermail/swift-evolution/Week-of-Mon-20151207/001537.html
https://lists.swift.org/pipermail/swift-evolution/Week-of-Mon-20160725/025692.html
/
https://lists.swift.org/pipermail/swift-evolution/Week-of-Mon-20160801/thread.html#25765

···

On Mon, Jan 23, 2017 at 9:59 AM, Joshua Alvarado via swift-evolution < swift-evolution@swift.org> wrote:

It will be painted! ;)

So far we have:
+2 Disclosure
+1 Slack
+1 Issue tracker

Let's really get everyone's opinions and see if we can get this rock
rolling towards a better solution. Of course it will be Apple's choice in
the end but we can give a voice on the matter to show we do care about
moving over.

Alvarado, Joshua

On Jan 23, 2017, at 10:55 AM, David Waite <david@alkaline-solutions.com> > wrote:

As long as we are pretending this bike shed is getting painted again…

I would actually prefer something closer to an issue tracker than
discourse. We get a lot of repeat and diverging topics, and it would be
nice to mark discussions as related, duplicates, etc

-DW

On Jan 23, 2017, at 9:22 AM, Adrian Zubarev via swift-evolution < > swift-evolution@swift.org> wrote:

+1 for Discourse <http://www.discourse.org/&gt;\. Cannot wait any longer for
this to happen.

--
Adrian Zubarev
Sent with Airmail

Am 23. Januar 2017 um 17:18:42, Joshua Alvarado via swift-evolution (
swift-evolution@swift.org) schrieb:

Hey swifters,
  I would like to (re)open up discussion on moving away from email for the
swift evolution mailing list. I know this has probably been discussed
before but it really should be addressed again. I wouldn't even know how to
find if it has been discussed before because it would be too hard to go
back through the history.

The main factors to move away from email is because email may deter
newcomers, history, and threads. I may be speaking for myself when saying
email may intimidate newcomers from expressing their opinions and thoughts.
It is hard to know what has already been discussed and who is even in the
active conversation. Keeping track of history is a pain as well. Searching
through many emails to find who said what and when is not effective in
email clients. Also, code formatting in emails is not effective. Let's
discuss and actually make an action to move away from email if the
community so agrees. Of course, recommendations are Slack, Hipchat (-1),
and Gitter.

--
Joshua Alvarado
alvaradojoshua0@gmail.com
_______________________________________________
swift-evolution mailing list
swift-evolution@swift.org
https://lists.swift.org/mailman/listinfo/swift-evolution

_______________________________________________
swift-evolution mailing list
swift-evolution@swift.org
https://lists.swift.org/mailman/listinfo/swift-evolution

_______________________________________________
swift-evolution mailing list
swift-evolution@swift.org
https://lists.swift.org/mailman/listinfo/swift-evolution

Another +1 for Discourse. I'd like to participate more, but the mailing list format is difficult for me to use.

I've gone through three email clients since swift-evolution started (Apple Mail, then Airmail, and now Spark), and they work well enough for general, simple email usage, but the mailing list experience has been poor enough to discourage me from participating. Threads get split all the time -- right now I see four separate threads for the "Strings in Swift 4" discussion. I'd need to click around each of them to get the entire discussion and piece together the chronology manually, and if I want to participate I need to somehow determine which thread is the correct one to reply to.

I appreciate the philosophy of the mailing list, but I really think that forum software would work much better from a practical standpoint.

I think a chat service like Slack could be useful as well, but not as a replacement for something like a forum. A forum works much better for long-form, asynchronous discussions.

Jarod

···

On Jan 23, 2017, 09:59 -0800, Joshua Alvarado via swift-evolution <swift-evolution@swift.org>, wrote:

It will be painted! ;)

So far we have:
+2 Disclosure
+1 Slack
+1 Issue tracker

Let's really get everyone's opinions and see if we can get this rock rolling towards a better solution. Of course it will be Apple's choice in the end but we can give a voice on the matter to show we do care about moving over.

Alvarado, Joshua

On Jan 23, 2017, at 10:55 AM, David Waite <david@alkaline-solutions.com> wrote:

> As long as we are pretending this bike shed is getting painted again…
>
> I would actually prefer something closer to an issue tracker than discourse. We get a lot of repeat and diverging topics, and it would be nice to mark discussions as related, duplicates, etc
>
> -DW
>
> > On Jan 23, 2017, at 9:22 AM, Adrian Zubarev via swift-evolution <swift-evolution@swift.org> wrote:
> >
> > +1 for Discourse. Cannot wait any longer for this to happen.
> >
> >
> >
> > --
> > Adrian Zubarev
> > Sent with Airmail
> >
> > Am 23. Januar 2017 um 17:18:42, Joshua Alvarado via swift-evolution (swift-evolution@swift.org) schrieb:
> > > Hey swifters,
> > > I would like to (re)open up discussion on moving away from email for the swift evolution mailing list. I know this has probably been discussed before but it really should be addressed again. I wouldn't even know how to find if it has been discussed before because it would be too hard to go back through the history.
> > >
> > > The main factors to move away from email is because email may deter newcomers, history, and threads. I may be speaking for myself when saying email may intimidate newcomers from expressing their opinions and thoughts. It is hard to know what has already been discussed and who is even in the active conversation. Keeping track of history is a pain as well. Searching through many emails to find who said what and when is not effective in email clients. Also, code formatting in emails is not effective. Let's discuss and actually make an action to move away from email if the community so agrees. Of course, recommendations are Slack, Hipchat (-1), and Gitter.
> > >
> > > --
> > > Joshua Alvarado
> > > alvaradojoshua0@gmail.com
> > > _______________________________________________
> > > swift-evolution mailing list
> > > swift-evolution@swift.org
> > > https://lists.swift.org/mailman/listinfo/swift-evolution
> >
> > _______________________________________________
> > swift-evolution mailing list
> > swift-evolution@swift.org
> > https://lists.swift.org/mailman/listinfo/swift-evolution
>
_______________________________________________
swift-evolution mailing list
swift-evolution@swift.org
https://lists.swift.org/mailman/listinfo/swift-evolution

Helps confirm the need of this change even more. Seems moving over is
something many would like and it won't causing any source-breaking changes
:)

···

On Mon, Jan 23, 2017 at 12:53 PM, Jacob Bandes-Storch <jtbandes@gmail.com> wrote:

Obligatory prior discussion sheds, er, I mean threads:

The swift-evolution Archives
Week-of-Mon-20151207/001537.html
The swift-evolution Archives
Week-of-Mon-20160725/025692.html / https://lists.swift.org/
pipermail/swift-evolution/Week-of-Mon-20160801/thread.html#25765

On Mon, Jan 23, 2017 at 9:59 AM, Joshua Alvarado via swift-evolution < > swift-evolution@swift.org> wrote:

It will be painted! ;)

So far we have:
+2 Disclosure
+1 Slack
+1 Issue tracker

Let's really get everyone's opinions and see if we can get this rock
rolling towards a better solution. Of course it will be Apple's choice in
the end but we can give a voice on the matter to show we do care about
moving over.

Alvarado, Joshua

On Jan 23, 2017, at 10:55 AM, David Waite <david@alkaline-solutions.com> >> wrote:

As long as we are pretending this bike shed is getting painted again…

I would actually prefer something closer to an issue tracker than
discourse. We get a lot of repeat and diverging topics, and it would be
nice to mark discussions as related, duplicates, etc

-DW

On Jan 23, 2017, at 9:22 AM, Adrian Zubarev via swift-evolution < >> swift-evolution@swift.org> wrote:

+1 for Discourse <http://www.discourse.org/&gt;\. Cannot wait any longer for
this to happen.

--
Adrian Zubarev
Sent with Airmail

Am 23. Januar 2017 um 17:18:42, Joshua Alvarado via swift-evolution (
swift-evolution@swift.org) schrieb:

Hey swifters,
  I would like to (re)open up discussion on moving away from email for
the swift evolution mailing list. I know this has probably been discussed
before but it really should be addressed again. I wouldn't even know how to
find if it has been discussed before because it would be too hard to go
back through the history.

The main factors to move away from email is because email may deter
newcomers, history, and threads. I may be speaking for myself when saying
email may intimidate newcomers from expressing their opinions and thoughts.
It is hard to know what has already been discussed and who is even in the
active conversation. Keeping track of history is a pain as well. Searching
through many emails to find who said what and when is not effective in
email clients. Also, code formatting in emails is not effective. Let's
discuss and actually make an action to move away from email if the
community so agrees. Of course, recommendations are Slack, Hipchat (-1),
and Gitter.

--
Joshua Alvarado
alvaradojoshua0@gmail.com
_______________________________________________
swift-evolution mailing list
swift-evolution@swift.org
https://lists.swift.org/mailman/listinfo/swift-evolution

_______________________________________________
swift-evolution mailing list
swift-evolution@swift.org
https://lists.swift.org/mailman/listinfo/swift-evolution

_______________________________________________
swift-evolution mailing list
swift-evolution@swift.org
https://lists.swift.org/mailman/listinfo/swift-evolution

--
Joshua Alvarado
alvaradojoshua0@gmail.com

+ 3 Disclosure
+ 1 Slack
+ 1 Issue Tracker

Jarod, I completely agree on your points. Changing from email threads will help participation and tracking threads.

The email threads work in favor for those who have figured out how to use them. I am usually seeing only the same people participating over and over and not to many new new people(I could be wrong here). I don't believe this accurately reflects the whole Swift community as it is really big. Let's allow others to get their thoughts in. That is why I really would like for this conversation to be at the forefront.

Alvarado, Joshua

···

On Jan 23, 2017, at 1:34 PM, Jarod Long <swift@lng.la> wrote:

Another +1 for Discourse. I'd like to participate more, but the mailing list format is difficult for me to use.

I've gone through three email clients since swift-evolution started (Apple Mail, then Airmail, and now Spark), and they work well enough for general, simple email usage, but the mailing list experience has been poor enough to discourage me from participating. Threads get split all the time -- right now I see four separate threads for the "Strings in Swift 4" discussion. I'd need to click around each of them to get the entire discussion and piece together the chronology manually, and if I want to participate I need to somehow determine which thread is the correct one to reply to.

I appreciate the philosophy of the mailing list, but I really think that forum software would work much better from a practical standpoint.

I think a chat service like Slack could be useful as well, but not as a replacement for something like a forum. A forum works much better for long-form, asynchronous discussions.

Jarod

On Jan 23, 2017, 09:59 -0800, Joshua Alvarado via swift-evolution <swift-evolution@swift.org>, wrote:
It will be painted! ;)

So far we have:
+2 Disclosure
+1 Slack
+1 Issue tracker

Let's really get everyone's opinions and see if we can get this rock rolling towards a better solution. Of course it will be Apple's choice in the end but we can give a voice on the matter to show we do care about moving over.

Alvarado, Joshua

On Jan 23, 2017, at 10:55 AM, David Waite <david@alkaline-solutions.com> wrote:

As long as we are pretending this bike shed is getting painted again…

I would actually prefer something closer to an issue tracker than discourse. We get a lot of repeat and diverging topics, and it would be nice to mark discussions as related, duplicates, etc

-DW

On Jan 23, 2017, at 9:22 AM, Adrian Zubarev via swift-evolution <swift-evolution@swift.org> wrote:

+1 for Discourse. Cannot wait any longer for this to happen.

--
Adrian Zubarev
Sent with Airmail

Am 23. Januar 2017 um 17:18:42, Joshua Alvarado via swift-evolution (swift-evolution@swift.org) schrieb:

Hey swifters,
  I would like to (re)open up discussion on moving away from email for the swift evolution mailing list. I know this has probably been discussed before but it really should be addressed again. I wouldn't even know how to find if it has been discussed before because it would be too hard to go back through the history.

The main factors to move away from email is because email may deter newcomers, history, and threads. I may be speaking for myself when saying email may intimidate newcomers from expressing their opinions and thoughts. It is hard to know what has already been discussed and who is even in the active conversation. Keeping track of history is a pain as well. Searching through many emails to find who said what and when is not effective in email clients. Also, code formatting in emails is not effective. Let's discuss and actually make an action to move away from email if the community so agrees. Of course, recommendations are Slack, Hipchat (-1), and Gitter.

--
Joshua Alvarado
alvaradojoshua0@gmail.com
_______________________________________________
swift-evolution mailing list
swift-evolution@swift.org
https://lists.swift.org/mailman/listinfo/swift-evolution

_______________________________________________
swift-evolution mailing list
swift-evolution@swift.org
https://lists.swift.org/mailman/listinfo/swift-evolution

_______________________________________________
swift-evolution mailing list
swift-evolution@swift.org
https://lists.swift.org/mailman/listinfo/swift-evolution

I meant more that we are dependent on Apple to actually change the existing official infrastructure to some new system. If all we want is an unofficial forum, any one of us could set that up now and invite people over for talk and snacks.

I assume swift-evolution is more of a meritocracy than a democracy - bringing up a topic again and taking votes may do little good if it doesn’t also bring up new justification to prioritize infrastructure changes.

But if we were using an issue tracker, I could mark this as a duplicate ;-)

-DW

···

On Jan 23, 2017, at 10:59 AM, Joshua Alvarado <alvaradojoshua0@gmail.com> wrote:

It will be painted! ;)

So far we have:
+2 Disclosure
+1 Slack
+1 Issue tracker

Let's really get everyone's opinions and see if we can get this rock rolling towards a better solution. Of course it will be Apple's choice in the end but we can give a voice on the matter to show we do care about moving over.

Alvarado, Joshua

On Jan 23, 2017, at 10:55 AM, David Waite <david@alkaline-solutions.com <mailto:david@alkaline-solutions.com>> wrote:

As long as we are pretending this bike shed is getting painted again…

I would actually prefer something closer to an issue tracker than discourse. We get a lot of repeat and diverging topics, and it would be nice to mark discussions as related, duplicates, etc

-DW

On Jan 23, 2017, at 9:22 AM, Adrian Zubarev via swift-evolution <swift-evolution@swift.org <mailto:swift-evolution@swift.org>> wrote:

+1 for Discourse <http://www.discourse.org/&gt;\. Cannot wait any longer for this to happen.

--
Adrian Zubarev
Sent with Airmail

Am 23. Januar 2017 um 17:18:42, Joshua Alvarado via swift-evolution (swift-evolution@swift.org <mailto:swift-evolution@swift.org>) schrieb:

Hey swifters,
  I would like to (re)open up discussion on moving away from email for the swift evolution mailing list. I know this has probably been discussed before but it really should be addressed again. I wouldn't even know how to find if it has been discussed before because it would be too hard to go back through the history.

The main factors to move away from email is because email may deter newcomers, history, and threads. I may be speaking for myself when saying email may intimidate newcomers from expressing their opinions and thoughts. It is hard to know what has already been discussed and who is even in the active conversation. Keeping track of history is a pain as well. Searching through many emails to find who said what and when is not effective in email clients. Also, code formatting in emails is not effective. Let's discuss and actually make an action to move away from email if the community so agrees. Of course, recommendations are Slack, Hipchat (-1), and Gitter.

--
Joshua Alvarado
alvaradojoshua0@gmail.com <mailto:alvaradojoshua0@gmail.com>_______________________________________________
swift-evolution mailing list
swift-evolution@swift.org <mailto:swift-evolution@swift.org>
https://lists.swift.org/mailman/listinfo/swift-evolution

_______________________________________________
swift-evolution mailing list
swift-evolution@swift.org <mailto:swift-evolution@swift.org>
https://lists.swift.org/mailman/listinfo/swift-evolution

We could mark it as high priority. ;)

But yes you are correct. Keeping a poll and a count won't do any good if Apple won't actually change the infrastructure. This topic is for an official change and not an spun up chat room. I do believe that if the issue is strong then it may be heard but if everyone is okay with the current implementation I don't want to push anything in the wrong direction.

Alvarado, Joshua

···

On Jan 23, 2017, at 2:41 PM, David Waite <david@alkaline-solutions.com> wrote:

I meant more that we are dependent on Apple to actually change the existing official infrastructure to some new system. If all we want is an unofficial forum, any one of us could set that up now and invite people over for talk and snacks.

I assume swift-evolution is more of a meritocracy than a democracy - bringing up a topic again and taking votes may do little good if it doesn’t also bring up new justification to prioritize infrastructure changes.

But if we were using an issue tracker, I could mark this as a duplicate ;-)

-DW

On Jan 23, 2017, at 10:59 AM, Joshua Alvarado <alvaradojoshua0@gmail.com> wrote:

It will be painted! ;)

So far we have:
+2 Disclosure
+1 Slack
+1 Issue tracker

Let's really get everyone's opinions and see if we can get this rock rolling towards a better solution. Of course it will be Apple's choice in the end but we can give a voice on the matter to show we do care about moving over.

Alvarado, Joshua

On Jan 23, 2017, at 10:55 AM, David Waite <david@alkaline-solutions.com> wrote:

As long as we are pretending this bike shed is getting painted again…

I would actually prefer something closer to an issue tracker than discourse. We get a lot of repeat and diverging topics, and it would be nice to mark discussions as related, duplicates, etc

-DW

On Jan 23, 2017, at 9:22 AM, Adrian Zubarev via swift-evolution <swift-evolution@swift.org> wrote:

+1 for Discourse. Cannot wait any longer for this to happen.

--
Adrian Zubarev
Sent with Airmail

Am 23. Januar 2017 um 17:18:42, Joshua Alvarado via swift-evolution (swift-evolution@swift.org) schrieb:

Hey swifters,
  I would like to (re)open up discussion on moving away from email for the swift evolution mailing list. I know this has probably been discussed before but it really should be addressed again. I wouldn't even know how to find if it has been discussed before because it would be too hard to go back through the history.

The main factors to move away from email is because email may deter newcomers, history, and threads. I may be speaking for myself when saying email may intimidate newcomers from expressing their opinions and thoughts. It is hard to know what has already been discussed and who is even in the active conversation. Keeping track of history is a pain as well. Searching through many emails to find who said what and when is not effective in email clients. Also, code formatting in emails is not effective. Let's discuss and actually make an action to move away from email if the community so agrees. Of course, recommendations are Slack, Hipchat (-1), and Gitter.

--
Joshua Alvarado
alvaradojoshua0@gmail.com
_______________________________________________
swift-evolution mailing list
swift-evolution@swift.org
https://lists.swift.org/mailman/listinfo/swift-evolution

_______________________________________________
swift-evolution mailing list
swift-evolution@swift.org
https://lists.swift.org/mailman/listinfo/swift-evolution

If you guys desire it, I'd be happy to host a forum for you all.
You'll have to give me a weak or two to get it fully set-up and stuff,
but once that's one, we can slowly, but surely, move there.
Registration will, of course, be free, as everything else is.

···

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Ethin Probst <harlydavidsen@gmail.com>
Date: Mon, 23 Jan 2017 15:43:59 -0600
Subject: Re: [swift-evolution] [Discussion] mailing list alternative
To: Joshua Alvarado <alvaradojoshua0@gmail.com>

On 1/23/17, Joshua Alvarado via swift-evolution <swift-evolution@swift.org> wrote:

+ 3 Disclosure
+ 1 Slack
+ 1 Issue Tracker

Jarod, I completely agree on your points. Changing from email threads will
help participation and tracking threads.

The email threads work in favor for those who have figured out how to use
them. I am usually seeing only the same people participating over and over
and not to many new new people(I could be wrong here). I don't believe this
accurately reflects the whole Swift community as it is really big. Let's
allow others to get their thoughts in. That is why I really would like for
this conversation to be at the forefront.

Alvarado, Joshua

On Jan 23, 2017, at 1:34 PM, Jarod Long <swift@lng.la> wrote:

Another +1 for Discourse. I'd like to participate more, but the mailing
list format is difficult for me to use.

I've gone through three email clients since swift-evolution started (Apple
Mail, then Airmail, and now Spark), and they work well enough for general,
simple email usage, but the mailing list experience has been poor enough
to discourage me from participating. Threads get split all the time --
right now I see four separate threads for the "Strings in Swift 4"
discussion. I'd need to click around each of them to get the entire
discussion and piece together the chronology manually, and if I want to
participate I need to somehow determine which thread is the correct one to
reply to.

I appreciate the philosophy of the mailing list, but I really think that
forum software would work much better from a practical standpoint.

I think a chat service like Slack could be useful as well, but not as a
replacement for something like a forum. A forum works much better for
long-form, asynchronous discussions.

Jarod

On Jan 23, 2017, 09:59 -0800, Joshua Alvarado via swift-evolution >>> <swift-evolution@swift.org>, wrote:
It will be painted! ;)

So far we have:
+2 Disclosure
+1 Slack
+1 Issue tracker

Let's really get everyone's opinions and see if we can get this rock
rolling towards a better solution. Of course it will be Apple's choice in
the end but we can give a voice on the matter to show we do care about
moving over.

Alvarado, Joshua

On Jan 23, 2017, at 10:55 AM, David Waite <david@alkaline-solutions.com> >>> wrote:

As long as we are pretending this bike shed is getting painted again…

I would actually prefer something closer to an issue tracker than
discourse. We get a lot of repeat and diverging topics, and it would be
nice to mark discussions as related, duplicates, etc

-DW

On Jan 23, 2017, at 9:22 AM, Adrian Zubarev via swift-evolution >>>>> <swift-evolution@swift.org> wrote:

+1 for Discourse. Cannot wait any longer for this to happen.

--
Adrian Zubarev
Sent with Airmail

Am 23. Januar 2017 um 17:18:42, Joshua Alvarado via swift-evolution
(swift-evolution@swift.org) schrieb:

Hey swifters,
  I would like to (re)open up discussion on moving away from email for
the swift evolution mailing list. I know this has probably been
discussed before but it really should be addressed again. I wouldn't
even know how to find if it has been discussed before because it would
be too hard to go back through the history.

The main factors to move away from email is because email may deter
newcomers, history, and threads. I may be speaking for myself when
saying email may intimidate newcomers from expressing their opinions
and thoughts. It is hard to know what has already been discussed and
who is even in the active conversation. Keeping track of history is a
pain as well. Searching through many emails to find who said what and
when is not effective in email clients. Also, code formatting in
emails is not effective. Let's discuss and actually make an action to
move away from email if the community so agrees. Of course,
recommendations are Slack, Hipchat (-1), and Gitter.

--
Joshua Alvarado
alvaradojoshua0@gmail.com
_______________________________________________
swift-evolution mailing list
swift-evolution@swift.org
https://lists.swift.org/mailman/listinfo/swift-evolution

_______________________________________________
swift-evolution mailing list
swift-evolution@swift.org
https://lists.swift.org/mailman/listinfo/swift-evolution

_______________________________________________
swift-evolution mailing list
swift-evolution@swift.org
https://lists.swift.org/mailman/listinfo/swift-evolution

--
Signed,
Ethin D. Probst

--
Signed,
Ethin D. Probst

I'd even be happy with phpBB. I wonder if there's an issue tracker plugin yet?

Whatever we use, we'll have to rewrite it in Swift, though, since this is supposed to be a language for server apps.

- Dave Sweeris

···

On Jan 23, 2017, at 09:59, Joshua Alvarado via swift-evolution <swift-evolution@swift.org> wrote:

It will be painted! ;)

So far we have:
+2 Disclosure
+1 Slack
+1 Issue tracker

Let's really get everyone's opinions and see if we can get this rock rolling towards a better solution. Of course it will be Apple's choice in the end but we can give a voice on the matter to show we do care about moving over.

We will, but we can't do any rewriting of anything until Swifts server
library is up and running, which I believe it is not (feel free to
correct me if I am wrong).
I'll go a little further and give a +4 for discourse. Or anything
else. My email is filled with a total of 13808 e-mails. 141 of those
are from the swift-evolution mailing list and 52 of those are from the
swift-users one, for a total of 193 e-mails. Do you think I'm willing
to browse all of those to determine what's going on? Hell no! A forum
would allow us to get the most germane and contemporary dialogue for
all the members. Why not just forumize all of the mailing lists, and
not just this one? Make it use only one instance of the forum software
and make separate categories--or forums, even--for each list so that
it's all rationalized. It would save people a lot of headaches trying
to remember URLs.

···

On 1/23/17, David Sweeris via swift-evolution <swift-evolution@swift.org> wrote:

On Jan 23, 2017, at 09:59, Joshua Alvarado via swift-evolution >> <swift-evolution@swift.org> wrote:

It will be painted! ;)

So far we have:
+2 Disclosure
+1 Slack
+1 Issue tracker

Let's really get everyone's opinions and see if we can get this rock
rolling towards a better solution. Of course it will be Apple's choice in
the end but we can give a voice on the matter to show we do care about
moving over.

I'd even be happy with phpBB. I wonder if there's an issue tracker plugin
yet?

Whatever we use, we'll have to rewrite it in Swift, though, since this is
supposed to be a language for server apps.

- Dave Sweeris
_______________________________________________
swift-evolution mailing list
swift-evolution@swift.org
https://lists.swift.org/mailman/listinfo/swift-evolution

--
Signed,
Ethin D. Probst

Obligatory prior discussion sheds, er, I mean threads:

[swift-evolution] Mailman?
[swift-evolution] [Swift4] Mailing list vs. Forum
/ The swift-evolution The Week Of Monday 1 August 2016 Archive by thread

I haven't followed the previous discussions closely. As someone who mostly follows the discussions passively and only rarely posts something to the list, I have two major complaints with the current situation:

* The disconnect between the messages in my mail client and their URLs in the list archive makes sharing or bookmarking messages a major pain in the ass. If it were possible for each message to contain its own permalink in the footer, I would be much happier. It seems this feature is available in Mailman 3 [1], but the Swift lists seem to be running on Mailman 2.x.

* The web archive has very bad usability. I suppose design is a matter of taste, but having the archive organized by week is just wrong. This means that readers will regularly miss significant parts of threads that cross week boundaries without even noticing it.

I don't like the mailing lists (and hadn't subscribed to any for close to a decade before Swift), but fixing the above two points would go 90% of the way for me.

If you're counting votes, I'm also +1 for trying out Discourse.

Another, less important complaint:

* Readability is inconsistent because people use different formatting and email allows full control over HTML. I assume a forum that allows Markdown strikes the ideal middle ground between some control over formatting but not needlessly messing with font sizes etc.

I can understand if the Swift team is hesitant to switch to a forum. If you have a working mailing list infrastructure everybody at the company is used to, migrating to a forum is a pretty big undertaking and potential disruption to the workflow. I'm not certain conversations will be much easier to follow in a forum.

I found it very uncomfortable to read the mailing lists in my normal mail client because I want a totally different UI for the two tasks of reading swift-evolution vs. reading my regular mail. But this can be solved pretty easily by using a separate mail client only for the lists. I actually ended up reading the lists in Thunderbird via NNTP on news.gmane.org. Since Gmane is currently reorganizing and not adding new lists, this means I can't do this for new lists like swift-server-dev, but other than that it works well. The biggest downside is that I am limited to one device because read status isn’t synced across devices.

[1]: [Mailman-Users] Include archive URL for the current email (in thefooter)?

+1
Its really hard to keep track of mails and threads.

···

Sent from my iPhone

On Jan 23, 2017, at 18:59, Joshua Alvarado via swift-evolution <swift-evolution@swift.org> wrote:

It will be painted! ;)

So far we have:
+2 Disclosure
+1 Slack
+1 Issue tracker

Let's really get everyone's opinions and see if we can get this rock rolling towards a better solution. Of course it will be Apple's choice in the end but we can give a voice on the matter to show we do care about moving over.

Alvarado, Joshua

On Jan 23, 2017, at 10:55 AM, David Waite <david@alkaline-solutions.com> wrote:

As long as we are pretending this bike shed is getting painted again…

I would actually prefer something closer to an issue tracker than discourse. We get a lot of repeat and diverging topics, and it would be nice to mark discussions as related, duplicates, etc

-DW

On Jan 23, 2017, at 9:22 AM, Adrian Zubarev via swift-evolution <swift-evolution@swift.org> wrote:

+1 for Discourse. Cannot wait any longer for this to happen.

--
Adrian Zubarev
Sent with Airmail

Am 23. Januar 2017 um 17:18:42, Joshua Alvarado via swift-evolution (swift-evolution@swift.org) schrieb:

Hey swifters,
  I would like to (re)open up discussion on moving away from email for the swift evolution mailing list. I know this has probably been discussed before but it really should be addressed again. I wouldn't even know how to find if it has been discussed before because it would be too hard to go back through the history.

The main factors to move away from email is because email may deter newcomers, history, and threads. I may be speaking for myself when saying email may intimidate newcomers from expressing their opinions and thoughts. It is hard to know what has already been discussed and who is even in the active conversation. Keeping track of history is a pain as well. Searching through many emails to find who said what and when is not effective in email clients. Also, code formatting in emails is not effective. Let's discuss and actually make an action to move away from email if the community so agrees. Of course, recommendations are Slack, Hipchat (-1), and Gitter.

--
Joshua Alvarado
alvaradojoshua0@gmail.com
_______________________________________________
swift-evolution mailing list
swift-evolution@swift.org
https://lists.swift.org/mailman/listinfo/swift-evolution

_______________________________________________
swift-evolution mailing list
swift-evolution@swift.org
https://lists.swift.org/mailman/listinfo/swift-evolution

_______________________________________________
swift-evolution mailing list
swift-evolution@swift.org
https://lists.swift.org/mailman/listinfo/swift-evolution

(Sending this again because the first was accidentally offlist. Stupid reply-to headers.)

+1 for Discourse from me as well.

As for making a Swift-based site, server libraries do exist (Perfect, Vapor, Kitura, etc.), but afaik there is currently no built-in server support yet.

-thislooksfun (tlf)

···

On Jan 23, 2017, at 6:53 PM, Ethin Probst via swift-evolution <swift-evolution@swift.org> wrote:

We will, but we can't do any rewriting of anything until Swifts server
library is up and running, which I believe it is not (feel free to
correct me if I am wrong).
I'll go a little further and give a +4 for discourse. Or anything
else. My email is filled with a total of 13808 e-mails. 141 of those
are from the swift-evolution mailing list and 52 of those are from the
swift-users one, for a total of 193 e-mails. Do you think I'm willing
to browse all of those to determine what's going on? Hell no! A forum
would allow us to get the most germane and contemporary dialogue for
all the members. Why not just forumize all of the mailing lists, and
not just this one? Make it use only one instance of the forum software
and make separate categories--or forums, even--for each list so that
it's all rationalized. It would save people a lot of headaches trying
to remember URLs.

On 1/23/17, David Sweeris via swift-evolution <swift-evolution@swift.org> wrote:

On Jan 23, 2017, at 09:59, Joshua Alvarado via swift-evolution >>> <swift-evolution@swift.org> wrote:

It will be painted! ;)

So far we have:
+2 Disclosure
+1 Slack
+1 Issue tracker

Let's really get everyone's opinions and see if we can get this rock
rolling towards a better solution. Of course it will be Apple's choice in
the end but we can give a voice on the matter to show we do care about
moving over.

I'd even be happy with phpBB. I wonder if there's an issue tracker plugin
yet?

Whatever we use, we'll have to rewrite it in Swift, though, since this is
supposed to be a language for server apps.

- Dave Sweeris
_______________________________________________
swift-evolution mailing list
swift-evolution@swift.org
https://lists.swift.org/mailman/listinfo/swift-evolution

--
Signed,
Ethin D. Probst
_______________________________________________
swift-evolution mailing list
swift-evolution@swift.org
https://lists.swift.org/mailman/listinfo/swift-evolution