[DISCUSS] Developer chat (+FoundationDB chat)

[Florian Hockmann]

Hi,

we currently have a public chat on Gitter for JanusGraph that is mainly used for questions by users. I think it would be helpful to have another room to discuss about the development of JanusGraph. It should only be used for quick informal discussions as all formal decisions should be made here in the Google group where they get more visibility and people have more time to voice their opinion. But a chat makes it easier to have quick discussion or to coordinate bigger development tasks.

In addition to a general developer chat room, I think that it might also be useful in the long term to create rooms for certain areas of development, e.g., for the driver or for a specific backend. Contributors already asked for a chat to coordinate the development of the FoundationDB backend. So, I suggest that we also create a dedicated room for the FoundationDB backend which is kind of a special case as it's still in an early state, not an official backend (yet?) and there apparently already exist some attempts in different organizations to improve that backend which shows the need for improved coordination in my opinion.

Are there any concerns with this? Otherwise I'll go ahead and create the rooms.

TLDR: I suggest that we create two new rooms in our Gitter JanusGraph organization:

1. JanusGraph Development
2. JanusGraph FoundationDB

Regards,

Florian

[Debasish Kanhar]

+1 for this.

I have always wanted a Developer's chat room, so that a quick informal question can be asked and be replied faster. Maybe even Slack will do like we have for ScyllaDB. Such way that, if there are any developers out there, they can also post remainders on Chat room that a new PR request is Pending can up for review in case Developers/Committers/Maintainers miss it out by mistake :-) (Like @Florian, once you get time, can you have a look at the updated PR for Janusgraph-python after resolving lot of Codacy issues? and ignoring aFalse positives)

As for JanusGraph FoundationDB channel, do we want the new channel specific to single backend like FoundataionDB? Can we generalize that? As per the posts I'm seeing on groups, a lot of people are adding new and new backends based on their use cases like SnowFlake, FoundataionDB, H2 MV Store, DynamoDB, EBay DB etc. If we have single chatroom for backend related addition development question, we can streamline a lot of  questions as well, as a lot of question related to adding new backend are similar. What do you say?

[f.gri...@gmail.com]

I think it's a good idea to have a separate room for each topic as long as it affects enough people to justify having it's own room. So maybe we can start with this one and add more on the fly when needed.

[Jan Jansen]

+1 for this.

Besides Gitter, we should think also about Slack or Discord. 

• Slack is much more common in the industry than Gitter.
• Discord had gain speed in the open-source communities in the last years and also support Talk channels directly.

[Debasish Kanhar]

Makes sense. If we have enough persons interested in specific to a topic, we can create a separate channel for the same. :-)

I would say +1 for this.

If we can have Slack it will be lot better. Wider acceptance ratio I feel but anything is okay :-)

[Oleksandr Porunov]

I rarely check Gitter but I am totally OK with adding new specific channels.

My vote is +1

[Jan Jansen]

Hi

We have three different chat options. If no one wants to add something, i will open up a vote to decide which platform we want to use. (This will happen tomorrow.)

Here the options again:

• Gitter
• Slack
• Discord
  

[Debasish Kanhar]

Sounds good Jan.

Let's go with the option where we have maximum developers/committers involved/or use it. So that the query posters / users can reach the maximum of our community :-)

[Misha Brukman]

FWIW, when we originally started JanusGraph, Henry Saputra (cc'd) lead an extensive evaluation of various chat options and we settled on Gitter, primarily because:

• unlike Slack, Gitter doesn't require running a bot to have people join a workspace: by default, Slack is closed to sign-ups; you can whitelist some domains, but you can't make it "public" so you end up having to run a bot like Slackin, SlackEngine or similar (with appropriate credentials) just so that folks can join the chat
• you have to create another account just for Slack — with Gitter, you can just trivially sign-in via OAuth, using your existing GitHub or Twitter account
• on the free plan, Slack limits how much history you can see, which decreases visibility for folks who are not signed in 24/7; Gitter provides full free access to the entire history

There may have been other issues which I'm forgetting; Henry, please add what I missed.

Overall, I would recommend that we not splinter the chat rooms across more than 1 service: since we're already using Gitter for chat, can't we just add another room there for FoundationDB or any other topic? It also has good support for Markdown and code formatting; I'm not sure what exactly we're missing from Slack with Gitter.

Misha

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[Jan Jansen]

Hi Misra,

Some of your reason are exactly the reason why I’m against Gitter. 

Currently Gitter is for JanusGraph just support chat. This channel would be hard to use for the developer focused talks. Therefore, we have created private channel or highly moderate channel just for development focused topics. I think having an extra platform where you have to signup separately would reduce the support questions, massively. 

I didn’t know history thing in slack. I mentioned also Discord which also includes voice channels.

Greetings,

Jan

On 7. Apr 2020, at 16:00, 'Misha Brukman' via JanusGraph developers <janusgr...@googlegroups.com> wrote:



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[Misha Brukman]

On Tue, Apr 7, 2020 at 11:36 AM 'Jan Jansen' via JanusGraph developers <janusgr...@googlegroups.com> wrote:

Some of your reason are exactly the reason why I’m against Gitter. 

Currently Gitter is for JanusGraph just support chat. This channel would be hard to use for the developer focused talks. Therefore, we have created private channel or highly moderate channel just for development focused topics. I think having an extra platform where you have to signup separately would reduce the support questions, massively. 

Are you trying to have the same separation on Gitter as we do with janusgraph-users@ and janusgraph-dev@ mailing lists? Would creating separate channels on Gitter not address this? Or are you saying you've already done this, and it's not helping?

 

I didn’t know history thing in slack.

Here's the specific documentation on the limits: https://slack.com/help/articles/115002422943-Message-file-and-app-limits-on-the-free-version-of-Slack

The free version of Slack limits the workspace to 10000 recent messages; however, my understanding is that this is a global number, not a per-channel number. In some free workspaces I've seen, for less active channels, this means ~zero history because other channels are so active, that they continuously exhaust the 10K most recent messages, so if you're not there to see the message, you'll see almost nothing.

 

I mentioned also Discord which also includes voice channels.

I didn't realize folks would enjoy live voice chat, but it does sound like an interesting option.

Misha 

[Jan Jansen]

On 7. Apr 2020, at 18:09, 'Misha Brukman' via JanusGraph developers <janusgr...@googlegroups.com> wrote:



On Tue, Apr 7, 2020 at 11:36 AM 'Jan Jansen' via JanusGraph developers <janusgr...@googlegroups.com> wrote:

Some of your reason are exactly the reason why I’m against Gitter. 

Currently Gitter is for JanusGraph just support chat. This channel would be hard to use for the developer focused talks. Therefore, we have created private channel or highly moderate channel just for development focused topics. I think having an extra platform where you have to signup separately would reduce the support questions, massively. 

Are you trying to have the same separation on Gitter as we do with janusgraph-users@ and janusgraph-dev@ mailing lists? Would creating separate channels on Gitter not address this? Or are you saying you've already done this, and it's not helping?

I thought about the separation of google groups. I think just a different channel of wouldn’t help because some people just ignore these rules. For example github issues, you have a template for question which says please ask in the google group and they ignore it. In the google group, you see it less often. I think an extra barrier between both channels would separate these topics better.

 

I didn’t know history thing in slack.

Here's the specific documentation on the limits: https://slack.com/help/articles/115002422943-Message-file-and-app-limits-on-the-free-version-of-Slack

The free version of Slack limits the workspace to 10000 recent messages; however, my understanding is that this is a global number, not a per-channel number. In some free workspaces I've seen, for less active channels, this means ~zero history because other channels are so active, that they continuously exhaust the 10K most recent messages, so if you're not there to see the message, you'll see almost nothing.

 

I mentioned also Discord which also includes voice channels.

I didn't realize folks would enjoy live voice chat, but it does sound like an interesting option.

Misha 

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[Florian Hockmann]

I think Misha has good arguments for staying on Gitter. I personally don't think that we need a high entry barrier for a developer chat as we currently also don't get many non-dev questions in the Google group for developers. People instead ask in janusgraph-users (if they ask in a Google group that is) and I don't see why that should be different on Gitter as they can still ask their usage questions in the main Gitter chat that is already quite active.

We should also try to stay as open as possible with our development discussions to not exclude some people in my opinion. If we notice that we still get too many usage questions in a dev chat, then we can still create a private chat room in Gitter. (It looks at least from a quick search that it's possible to do that with Gitter.)

The other main argument against Gitter and pro Discord I see would be the voice chat, but I'm not sure how important that actually is for us.

Another topic that was discussed here was whether we actually need a dedicated channel just for FoundationDB. I don't have a strong opinion either way, but I suggest that we then simply start with a general dev channel and see whether we have a lot of FoundationDB specific discussions there and then we can still create a dedicated channel.

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[Henry Saputra]

Sorry I just saw this discussions. Thanks for pinging me, Misha.

As Misha and Florian had mentioned, we did some investigating and exploring which "chat" tool we will use for JanusGraph.

We chose Gitter due to the low barrier and maintenance to join and start discussions compare to Slack.

The discussion that Florian start with was about new channel for Development discussions in Gitter for JanusGraph, which I think it is great idea, so +1 for it.

This will allow real-time mechanism in addition to our mailing list to talk about development ideas and progress.

As for FoundationDb, I think we could just use Dev channel to discuss about it instead of dedicated channel for it.

We could discuss moving or embrace other chat tool like Slack and Discord in other thread as separate topic.

Thanks,

- Henry

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[Florian Hockmann]

It looks like we have a wide consensus on starting a new channel for development discussions, but different opinions on whether we should directly create a dedicated channel for FoundationDB and also on whether we should switch to a different system than Gitter.

So, I will create a new channel janusgraph-dev on Gitter and we can then see whether we need dedicated channels for, e.g., FoundationDB. If contributors have a strong opinion on moving to a different system, then please start a different thread for that so we can discuss it in general as Henry also already suggested. Since we didn't reach a consensus on this topic here, I don't want to let it stop the creation of the dev channel.

If that sounds OK to everyone, I will create the janusgraph-dev channel tomorrow on Gitter.

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[Florian Hockmann]

I created the channel: https://gitter.im/janusgraph/janusgraph-dev

You should all be able to join. I'll also create a PR to add it to our README.md.

[Henry Saputra]

Thanks for driving this, Florian

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