Re: [Xen-devel] Improve or change devel mailing-list for improve efficiency and spending less time, is this possible?

[Russell Pavlicek <russell.pavlicek@xxxxxxxxxx>]

Please forgive the top-post.  I am stuck with an interface which does not 
facilitate inline replies (as insane as that may sound).

>Russell has evaluated some off-the shelf tooling that would allow bridging
>the gap: unfortunately there is nothing good out there, which works well
>in practice. Google groups, which was designed with list support in it
>also kind of sucks. However, I believe we still have a project with a
>contractor ongoing to try and bridge xen-users with
>http://xenproject.org/help/questions-and-answers.html (such that they
>become mirrors of each other) - I will let Russell give an update. If that
>project gets to the point that the bridge works, that nobody is badly
>impacted, maybe we can consider extending it to other lists.

Lars is correct that the choices are sparse and poor when it comes to skinning 
existing email lists as forums.  We have a stalled, but on-going, project to 
skin the xen-users mailing list on the Q&A forum on XenProject.org.  Most of 
the basic functionality exists in the extension we are trying to use, but 
functions (emailing certain parties who are interacting via the website) do not 
work as advertised.  The contractor was following up with the extension 
provider, but atop-to-bottom reorganization of the contracting company has put 
the effort on hold for the past several weeks until they reboot their services 
division (supposedly, "next month"; we'll see).

We were approached by a startup last year which had promising forum-skinning 
technology, but they were both closed source and expensive.  I think that 
company may have failed already.

There are a handful of options of integrated forum & mailing list (Discourse 
being one of the most prominent), but they require recreating the mailing list 
under the auspices of the tool. So the xen-devel mailing list as we know it 
would have to be abandoned and/or migrated to the new tool.  That represents a 
potentially large disturbance to existing users, which isn't desirable.

I haven't reassessed the solution landscape in a few months, so maybe it is 
time to check again.  But I am not hopeful that we will find a good result.

BTW, if you know someone looking for their next FOSS project, feel free to 
suggest transparent skinning of an email list with a forum interface.  It is a 
real niche with no good players.

Russ Pavlicek
Xen Project Evangelist, Citrix Systems
Home Office: +1-301-829-5327
Mobile: +1-301-814-1143
UK VoIP: +44 1223 852 894

________________________________________
From: Lars Kurth
Sent: Monday, August 31, 2015 1:32 PM
To: Wei Liu; Fabio Fantoni; Russell Pavlicek
Cc: xen devel
Subject: Re: [Xen-devel] Improve or change devel mailing-list for improve 
efficiency and spending less time, is this possible?

Adding Russell,


On 31/08/2015 15:16, "Wei Liu" <wei.liu2@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

>CC Lars.
>
>On Mon, Aug 31, 2015 at 03:46:30PM +0200, Fabio Fantoni wrote:
>> I saw some discussions about the developer cycle, patch review and how
>>to
>> improve.
>>
>> Based on what I saw an important thing for improve efficiency and
>>spending
>> less time is the way of communication, actual seems only
>>mailing-list/mails.
>>
>> It seems to me that currently has some limits and in many cases takes a
>>long
>> time for some specific searches,trouble finding patches that need
>>attention
>> etc...
>>
>> A good solution I think would be a forum specific for developing with
>>these
>> features:

Fabio, of course the downside is that some developers are quite happy with
mailing lists. There is also a generational gap: developers that grew up
with lists prefer lists, developers that grew up with forums prefer forums
(the same is true for people starting in FOSS with github, which exposes
forum like functionality). This is a well known problem in many FOSS
communities.
http://programmers.stackexchange.com/questions/71148/why-do-programmers-sti
ll-use-mailing-lists is covering many topics of that debate (without
getting religious about it).

We did also have a discussion at the 2014 developer meeting, where we
discussed the high volume of traffic on xen-devel. At the time we decided
not to split the list and use better tagging (arm, x86, tools, ...).

Russell has evaluated some off-the shelf tooling that would allow bridging
the gap: unfortunately there is nothing good out there, which works well
in practice. Google groups, which was designed with list support in it
also kind of sucks. However, I believe we still have a project with a
contractor ongoing to try and bridge xen-users with
http://xenproject.org/help/questions-and-answers.html (such that they
become mirrors of each other) - I will let Russell give an update. If that
project gets to the point that the bridge works, that nobody is badly
impacted, maybe we can consider extending it to other lists.



>> - light even if with many specific features useful for developing and
>> compatible with all browser and devices
>> - have all as forum discussion that is easier to search, access to all
>>post
>> etc... now the search is only via web for month (losing link in
>>different
>> months) and with mail (if storing thousands of emails per month)

Actually, this is why provide http://xen.markmail.org/ - it also provides
some advanced search queries (see
http://markmail.org/docs/faq.xqy#searchsyntax)
I can check whether we can configure mhonarc our archiver differently, or
whether there are other options. Maybe there are better archivers we could
look at also

>> - possibility to include group or single users (for example
>>maintainers) to
>> a discussion (also notify with mails based on specific destination users
>> settings), better that send mails, faster for search, will avoid also
>> problem of mails not received, mail address changed etc...

I guess that would be hard to implement (even scripts/get_maintainer.pl
has issues). Also of course the drawback is that the entire contribution
workflow may have to change (it is currently build around git send-email)

>> - good patch "integration", possibility to include/see/download
>>patches, raw
>> vision (like the patch sent now with mail with git), add of special tags
>> etc... This is probably the more difficult thing to do because need to
>>find
>> the best way to manage well the patches, including series and ultimately
>> have a better solution to track, review, comment, etc...

I am not sure, whether there is any decent git integration with any
forums.

>> - optionally automatic include maintainer for patch posted, probably
>>after
>> loading it on server scanning with a similar to
>>scripts/get_maintainer.pl

See above

>> - advanced searching including if is a normal discussion or patch, if
>>the
>> user is present on notify list, selection of all tags, for example for
>> search in patch that are fix or features, is the discussion/patch is
>>without
>> reply or with reply older that specified range (faster search of patch
>> without review, or without recent reply), is closed (about patch if
>>merged)
>> or not

We may be able to do some of this: I am currently working with a company
called Bitergia which does open source dashboards and analysis of open
source communities. One of these activities is to model the review process
for us, such that we can reliable stats.

You can do some of what you need with the xen mark mail search with
queries such as 'list:xen-devel subject:patch -subject:"Re:"'

There is a problem with identifying stale reviews on mailing lists. Which
is what I assume you are looking for. You can't tell reliably from the
list whether
* a review has ended because the code went into git
* whether it has been abandoned
* whether it is waiting to be looked at

Bitergia have been working on a new UI for other projects. A prototype for
us it at http://projects.bitergia.com/previews/ng/dashboard.html?db=xen :
the data sources are not quite right, the config is not quite right and it
does not cover reviews. In any case, you can filter commits by time, repo,
company, ... The link back to git is currently also not yet working.

A similar view would be available for code reviews: right now, that only
works for projects that use Gerrit or similar tools. But assuming we can
model the review workflow for us, it may be possible to create some custom
searches on that combined database. You can filter by

>>
>>
>> I did a fast internet search about without find a similar solution, the
>>only
>> near thing is probably forum with some specific extension (if exist).

I don't think there is much today, which is surprising.

>> There are some solutions with part of these goals but lacking in some
>> important, for example github.

>>
>> What do you think about this?
>>
>>
>> Thanks for any reply and sorry for my bad english.

Your English was great!

>>
>> _______________________________________________
>> Xen-devel mailing list
>> Xen-devel@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
>> http://lists.xen.org/xen-devel


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