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

[Jimi Huotari]

On Wed, 12 Jun 2019 05:38:30 +0200
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 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.

It would be nice to have some actual examples of these issues.

I have been browsing the forums since 2010 as a user, and since 2015
as a moderator, and what /I/ tend to see, is people encouraging
others
 to file bug reports [1][2][3][4][5] whenever it seems to be a
good
 idea.  I wonder how many bugs would /not/ have been brought to
the
 attention of developers without the forums.  :]

I dare say the forums often save developer time by quite a lot,
too, when the issue at hand would be resolved as INVALID
for example, which might additionally leave the user frustrated
and without any idea towards how to fix things [6].

Ultimately, it's up to the user of course, just like it would be
without the forums.

> 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.

When I think of 'pip' and the forums, all I can think of, is users
asking others /not/ to install things as root with it
[7][8][9][10][11].  I suspect this issue has more to do with 'pip'
itself, and the guides/documentation regarding it in the wild.

> 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.

For 1), perhaps we could create scripts that will scan all the forum
forum posts that are being created, and, when a package name is
matched, will send copies of the posts via mail to the maintainers
of said packages that are being discussed, and perhaps automatically
files bug reports for them as well, why not.

For 2), have all the posts go via the Gentoo Quality Assurance
Project, before they hit the forums?

There may be some jest within the preceding suggestions, but I
don't quite see how you'd expect these things to be fixed (that
is not to say that I agree them being problems that are in need
of a fix).

It's a community helping out the community, and if it has been
a great burden on developers, I don't remember having heard or
read of it before now.

0. https://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic-t-826842.html
1. https://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic-p-189786.html#189786
2. https://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic-p-3341931.html#3341931
3. https://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic-p-8030732.html#8030732
4. https://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic-p-7143726.html#7143726
5. https://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic-p-8233138.html#8233138
6. https://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic-t-1073732.html
7. https://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic-p-7497450.html#7497450
8. https://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic-p-8109926.html#8109926
9. https://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic-p-7901776.html#7901776
10. https://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic-p-7665482.html#7665482
11. https://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic-p-8226884.html#8226884