On Wed, 8 Feb 2023 at 16:47, William Stein <wst...@gmail.com> wrote: > > Hi Sage Devs, > > Any thoughts about enabling "Github Discussions" for SageMath on > Github now?
I just want to share my experience of this feature being used in the SymPy GitHub repo because I personally think that enabling it was a mistake. I dislike the interface of the discussions feature but more importantly I think it's organisationally bad to use GitHub for end user support in a large project that has many users. In a smaller project that e.g. doesn't have a mailing list I can see how it might be useful for situations where someone wants to talk to the developers without having to create an open issue but I don't think that necessarily carries over to larger projects. Following and responding to notifications on a busy repo is time consuming and can be mentally draining. The pool of people who will do that is smaller than the pool of people who would subscribe to e.g. a mailing list. For example I am not going to subscribe to notifications from the SageMath repo but I am quite happy to skim messages on this mailing list and only occasionally respond to anything. The basic problem with GitHub's discussions feature is that it places the burden of user support on to the smaller group of people who are actively engaging with the repo. Those people are already dealing with the large number of incoming issues, bugs, feature requests, pull requests, new contributors etc and it is important not to make that any more difficult or time consuming than it needs to be. > This can be used much like ask.sagemath.org or sage-support, but is > more modern and easy to moderate. It's also very easy > to move a github issue to be a discussion, when somebody opens an > issue that really should just be a request for help. This is the one significant advantage of the discussions feature. Closing an issue as invalid is not nice for the person who opened the issue. Being able to transfer the issue to a discussion instead comes across less harshly. However from the perspective of the maintainer who would close an invalid issue the difficult part is deciding whether something is an issue or not. The fact that you can turn the issue into a discussion does not make it any less draining to have to decide (often with incomplete information) whether or not an issue is valid or even whether the person opening the issue intended for it to be a bug report rather than just a request for help. Personally I prefer for user support and discussion fora to be clearly separated from GitHub and to happen somewhere where there is a larger pool of people who can engage more recreationally rather than feeling any burden to respond. Those fora can triage problems around user confusion before it gets to the point of opening a GitHub issue. Ideally what would otherwise be invalid issues would be filtered out before they reach GitHub. If the desire is to have something more modern and easy to moderate than a mailing list then my suggestion would be to use Discourse forums. -- Oscar -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "sage-devel" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to sage-devel+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/sage-devel/CAHVvXxTuOaypGK7ma2B-Jfon7C9Z%2B0brT1HPHPQFnRbVqRQ0Xg%40mail.gmail.com.
