Josh Boyer wrote:
> Ah. May or may not. That gives me hope at least.
Well, considering that we have hundreds of existing contributors, who all
may or may not be willing to adapt to a platform that is clearly not
designed for them (Discourse is very strongly newbie-centric, see the
"achievements" and all the other hand-holding), I think it is safe to assume
that several important contributors WILL leave, tone down their
participation, and/or miss some important communication (leading to breakage
in the distribution, e.g., broken dependencies making it into Rawhide) if
Fedora makes the switch.
I may be in that list of toning down, but that is OK. Look it's really time for new people to come in and break things. It is the only way they really learn if something is something that should be really avoided or was a taboo we had from the 1990's which we can't see as cargo culting anymore.
Maybe a bunch of packages will be dropped and Fedora will become 'useless' to some of us older contributors. This isn't the first time that has happened with the distribution (we saw large drop-offs after we stopped Xen and when we changed desktops to GNOME3.) and if the distribution is to last as an institution, it won't be the last. We who aren't happy with it can either make do with something else, adapt, or finally retire to grow potatoes like all the programmers I knew from the 1980s who had gotten tired of all the changes over the years.
Normally this is where I would clip the rest of the message, but I want to say something about a later section, so please scroll.
> It's a barrier to entry problem. If we, as the experienced and capable
> contributor base, can adapt to something and lower the barrier to entry
> then it benefits us all.
Again, I do not see the communication platform as the main barrier to entry
for Fedora at all. Where is the evidence for that claim?
As I see it, the main roadblocks for new packagers are:
* accepting the FPCA,
* getting sponsored,
* learning the Packaging Guidelines, and
* getting their package(s) through review,
and that last point can be a roadblock even for existing packagers (because
we do not trust even experienced provenpackagers and/or packager sponsors to
review their own packages).
Those points are all there for a reason (the FPCA for legal coverage, the
sponsorship process so new contributors are mentored and their trustfulness
verified, the Packaging Guidelines to ensure a certain package quality for
our end users, and the review process to ensure that the Packaging
Guidelines are actually followed and as another check that nothing malicious
sneaks in), but they are the barrier to entry, not the communication
platform.
I want to say that I agree with Kevin Kofler on this. We have a lot of other barriers for entry which I have found to be higher on getting new contributors into the distribution. Unless we have some field in the discussion site with interested and energized people who can help mentor future packagers.. we aren't addressing the real problem. That said, this discussion hasn't been about how to fix that problem either here OR the forum.