Re: [gentoo-project] Deferred decision: Forums (specifically OTW)

[Alec Warner]

On Tue, Jun 11, 2019 at 8:38 PM Michał Górny <mgorny@g.o> wrote:

> On Tue, 2019-06-04 at 15:05 +0200, Kristian Fiskerstrand wrote:
> > The agenda item "Forums (specifically OTW)" was deferred to further
> > discussion in the mailing lists during the 2019-02-10 council meeting.
> > The agenda for that meeting can be found at [Agenda] and the tracking
> > bug is [Bug 677824].
> >
> > This email aims to re-opens the discussion [which was started in a
> > previous thread] as per the council decision.
> >
> > I ask that the discussion remains civil and respectful, while also
> > allowing for a high bar for the actual discussion.
> >
>
> I don't think OTW is a major problem.  The real problem are *technical*
> forums, and those cause two problems.  The first of them is that
> developers rarely hear of the problems with their packages.  The second
> of them is that Forums tend to breed very bad 'solutions'.
>

I'm curious how this is different from other support forums. Are there no
bad solutions proposed on the wiki? in #gentoo? In other channels?

-A


>
> I don't mind providing multiple support channels as long as problems
> actually reach developers.  However, I don't think it's news to most of
> the developers who don't actively participate in Forums (read: look
> for new threads everywhere) that some problems never leave them.
>
> During my years in Gentoo I've been pinged a few times over expansive
> Forum threads on problems with my packages which never made it to
> Bugzilla or anything else that I actually could've noticed.  It all
> relies on courtesy of accidental developers (who are not Forum
> moderators, I should add).  I can only imagine how many problems were
> never addressed properly because the maintainer never learned of them,
> and cheap hacks proposed on Forums were sufficient for the users.
>
> And no, I don't think that requiring every developer to directly follow
> all Forum feeds is a solution.
>
> A side effect of the former problem is that Forums are home to many
> horrible 'solutions'.  Sadly, those solutions sometimes involve making
> things *much worse* than they were before.  This is problem both for
> users who end up victims of having their systems broken, and developers
> who end up having to help fix the resulting breakage.
>
> Breakage resulting from use of dev-python/pip is the most prominent
> example I know of.  Multiple Forum victims ended up using it to 'fix'
> problems.  As a result, they ended up with obsolete directly installed
> packages overriding Gentoo packages and breaking stuff.  The scale of
> this was so great that I had to actually patch dev-python/pip to block
> installing packages system-wide.  Which is a technical hack to a social
> problem.
>
> I'm not saying Forums is the only source of the problem, people can
> figure out how to break systems themselves.  However, Forums is
> frequently a source of bad information that is mistakenly trusted
> and is not properly verified and rejected.
>
> To summarize, I think the two major problems with the Forums are:
> 1) not passing information properly to package maintainers,
> and 2) lack of proper Q/A.  If you can solve them, I don't have any
> problem with the Forums.


> --
> Best regards,
> Michał Górny
>
>