zarr-developers/community

GH Discussions discussion

joshmoore opened this issue · 8 comments

Following on from comments like zarr-developers/zarr-specs#244 (comment) (and my general poor ability to make use of GH Discussions), I've reviewed which repositories in the zarr-developers organization have GH Discussions turned on:

Repo Count Purpose Proposals
Org level 5 Catch-all 1, 4, ???
Blog 4 Used for blog discussions Keep (only for blog)
Benchmark 6 WG discussion Keep (WG only)
community N/A Redirects to Org N/A
zarr-python Lots Misc (some spec stuff) 2, 3, 4, ???
zarr-specs 3 impl/specs 3, 4, ???
ZEPs 1 "request review" 3, 4, ???

Clarifications:

My personal feeling is the reducing the number of places that there can be Discussions is a Good Thing™️. A low-hanging fruit is to combine zarr-specs and ZEPs.

Beyond that, some options I can see are:

  1. No big change; don't worry about this now.
  2. Only org-level discussions
  3. Discussions on zarr-python and org-level (includes specs)
  4. Discussions on zarr-python and somewhere spec-y
  5. Discussions on zarr-python, somewhere spec-y, and org-level (as the catch-all)
  6. Use Issues everywhere.

Feel free to add more options and/or list your thoughts.

Pinging @zarr-developers/steering-council @zarr-developers/implementation-council @zarr-developers/python-core-devs @zarr-developers/community-manager

If no one is particularly worried about this, I'm inclined to move forward with collapsing discussions that we can (esp. ZEPs & zarr-specs), but if, e.g., the zarr-python teams want to keep separate discussions, then 👍.

I'm not too worried. Discussions are like issues without a specific problem to be fixed - I use them about the same. If someone watches a repo, they will get notifications about both types equally, I think (is probably configurable).

I favor keeping discussions around for zarr-python. I find that usage questions are much easier to manage there and like having the ability to transfer open-ended issues to discussions as a matter of house keeping.

If its possible to combine discussions around zeps and the spec, that seems like a reasonable thing to do.

👍 to keeping zarr-python discussions standalone and consolidating others.

In zarr-developers/zeps#55 I made a specific proposal about how to streamline the ZEP / spec discussion process. Do we feel like that suggestion is actionable?

@MSanKeys963 is working on changes to ZEP0.

jni commented

My personal preference is to nuke all GH discussions. I hate the threading because it's impossible to know if multiple threads have been updated since you last looked. I'm generally ok with using closed issues for long-running discussions that don't need code fixing etc.

But, that's just my 2c. 😉

d-v-b commented

My personal preference is to nuke all GH discussions. I hate the threading because it's impossible to know if multiple threads have been updated since you last looked. I'm generally ok with using closed issues for long-running discussions that don't need code fixing etc.

But, that's just my 2c. 😉

@jni although I don't think we are putting github discussions under enough load to cause the problems you describe, suppose we were -- what would you recommend as an alternative? And (here's the hard part), how would you recommend we get everyone to use it?

jni commented

As I mentioned, good ol' issues, which makes it trivial for people to participate. (There's also Discourse but that has a much higher activation energy.)