Taking github noise away from puppet-dev list

[Michael Stahnke]

Since our move to github for pull requests and patches, the usefulness
of puppet-dev has declined significantly. puppet-dev used to be a
great list for development discussion of puppet and the ecosystem
around it. With the information and pull request emails from github,
unless everybody has finely-tuned their email clients, the puppet-dev
list has turned into mostly noise.

We have a goal to foster development discussion from the community.
Because of that, I am proposing we move the github notifications to a
new list, puppet-commits. I realize this may have a consequence of
reducing patch/commit discussion. This should be compensated by:

1. Still having a list where pull requests can be commented on
2. Ability to comment on pull requests directly on github
3. More forethought and discussion on the dev list prior to making a
pull request/patch.
4. You can also watch the RSS feed for the puppet projects you have
the most interest in.

This decision isn't final, but I would like to get opinions on the
idea. I welcome feedback until Friday, April 13.

Michael Stahnke
Community Manager

[Jeff McCune]

On Mon, Apr 9, 2012 at 5:09 PM, Michael Stahnke <sta...@puppetlabs.com> wrote:

We have a goal to foster development discussion from the community.
Because of that, I am proposing we move the github notifications to a
new list, puppet-commits.  I realize this may have a consequence of
reducing patch/commit discussion.  This should be compensated by:

Everything old is new again.

http://groups.google.com/group/puppet-commit ?

-Jeff

[Michael Stahnke]

I was pretty sure we had this list, and then forgot to look before
sending. Oh well.

Either way, the point remains about removing the github notifications
on the puppet-dev list.

>
> -Jeff
>
>
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[Eric Sorenson]

+1 Please do this.

[Ohad Levy]

+1

> Everything old is new again.
>
>

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[markus]

> We have a goal to foster development discussion from the community.
> Because of that, I am proposing we move the github notifications to a
> new list, puppet-commits. I realize this may have a consequence of
> reducing patch/commit discussion. This should be compensated by:
>
> 1. Still having a list where pull requests can be commented on
> 2. Ability to comment on pull requests directly on github
> 3. More forethought and discussion on the dev list prior to making a
> pull request/patch.
> 4. You can also watch the RSS feed for the puppet projects you have
> the most interest in.
>
> This decision isn't final, but I would like to get opinions on the
> idea. I welcome feedback until Friday, April 13.

+1, for old times sake.

-- M

[Dan Bode]

+1

Michael Stahnke
Community Manager

[Brice Figureau]

On Mon, 2012-04-09 at 14:09 -0700, Michael Stahnke wrote:
> Since our move to github for pull requests and patches, the usefulness
> of puppet-dev has declined significantly. puppet-dev used to be a
> great list for development discussion of puppet and the ecosystem
> around it. With the information and pull request emails from github,
> unless everybody has finely-tuned their email clients, the puppet-dev
> list has turned into mostly noise.

IMHO, that's not the root cause of the problem. Back to the time we were
sending patches to the list, discussion could spark easily on a topic,
based on a comment on a patch.

Nowadays, I don't even read patches because they're either one click
away or difficult to read in the e-mail. Worst: most of the time I open
the "close" pull request e-mail by mistake (thinking it is the open one)
and struggle to find the real "open" one to read the patch. (I believe
we don't need this "close" e-mail, it just adds unnecessary noise).
One reason the patches are difficult to read is that all sub-patches are
merged in one big chunk, so you're losing the author intent.

More generally the move to github certainly increased the development
team velocity (which is good), it might also have increased the
community contributions, but I think it also decreased the community
involvement on the dev list.

Maybe nobody feels like me or that's because there are much more patches
than there was before, but the dev list was a good way to stay tuned on
what happens in the Puppet code. I just feel it isn't now anymore.
Maybe I'm a dinosaur and I need to follow more carefully what happens on
github :)

Also, a lot of the discussion moved to the pull request in github, so it
disappeared from the dev-list. Now to be part of the discussion, you
need to follow the pull request discussion manually. If you weren't part
of the discussion at start, it now requires more involvement compared to
receiving all discussion in my mail client.

> We have a goal to foster development discussion from the community.
> Because of that, I am proposing we move the github notifications to a
> new list, puppet-commits. I realize this may have a consequence of
> reducing patch/commit discussion. This should be compensated by:

Since the move to github commit discussion happened on github, so that's
a non-issue.

> 1. Still having a list where pull requests can be commented on
> 2. Ability to comment on pull requests directly on github
> 3. More forethought and discussion on the dev list prior to making a
> pull request/patch.

That'd be really great. And I noticed some attempts lately in this
direction, which is really good.

> 4. You can also watch the RSS feed for the puppet projects you have
> the most interest in.

You mean the commit/pull request feed on github, or the redmine feed?

> This decision isn't final, but I would like to get opinions on the
> idea. I welcome feedback until Friday, April 13.

What would be utterly awesome would be better pull request e-mails flow
on this commit (or on the dev) list:

* no close e-mail
* more readable inlined patches (syntax coloring?, broken in different
e-mails per commit?)
* send back to the thread on this list the internal discussion happening
on github

Thanks,
--
Brice Figureau
Follow the latest Puppet Community evolutions on www.planetpuppet.org!

[Ken Barber]

>> 3.  More forethought and discussion on the dev list prior to making a
>> pull request/patch.
>
> That'd be really great. And I noticed some attempts lately in this
> direction, which is really good.

I've been moving more discussions onto puppet-dev in the last few
weeks, as I've been delving more into Puppet code (where normally I
just potter around facter). But mainly its because I miss these
community discussions - for me since the request volume increased I've
felt puppet-dev was harder to wade through so I probably started to
move discussions to private threads or internal lists instead. So I
think the noise is part of the problem tbh.

Personally I really really want the open discussion back, I'm a remote
employee so I can't have hall-way conversations with devs and my other
colleagues - but the silly dev questions I'm going to ask via email I
think are interesting to other community developers - so having them
open to the world I think benefits all.

ken.

[Dean Wilson]

On 12 April 2012 08:48, Brice Figureau <brice-...@daysofwonder.com> wrote:

> Nowadays, I don't even read patches because they're either one click
> away or difficult to read in the e-mail. Worst: most of the time I open
> the "close" pull request e-mail by mistake (thinking it is the open one)
> and struggle to find the real "open" one to read the patch. (I believe
> we don't need this "close" e-mail, it just adds unnecessary noise).
> One reason the patches are difficult to read is that all sub-patches are
> merged in one big chunk, so you're losing the author intent.

> Maybe nobody feels like me or that's because there are much more patches

> than there was before, but the dev list was a good way to stay tuned on
> what happens in the Puppet code. I just feel it isn't now anymore.

While I still read most of the patches I have to agree with what Brice
has eloquently said throughout his mail. I think it has become harder
to casually keep up as an interested observer and requires a bigger
time investment than it used to, and that's not just because of the
increased development output.

Dean
--
Dean Wilson               http://www.unixdaemon.net
Profanity is the one language all programmers understand
--- Anon

[R.I.Pienaar]

What they said.

[James Turnbull]

> * no close e-mail
> * more readable inlined patches (syntax coloring?, broken in different
> e-mails per commit?)
> * send back to the thread on this list the internal discussion happening
> on github

I agree with Brice. The only way to bring the conversation back here is
not to segment/split the conversation...

James

--
James Turnbull
Puppet Labs
1-503-734-8571
To schedule a meeting with me: http://tungle.me/jamtur01

[Andrew Parker]

I just recently started working at Puppet Labs and have been pretty much been ignoring most of what I see from this list because of the amount of github mail on it. I think that removing the github email from this list will help it to do what I'm hoping to see on it, which is to have discussions around the design of puppet and not about being notified or reviewing the code of its implementation. So to the level that code showing up on the list helps to foster discussion about what puppet is or should be, then I think that it would add quite a lot, but when most of it is just a running stream of commits and merges of things that are not part of a larger discussion it seems like it would just add noise.

[Michael Stahnke]

So, after a week of contemplation, I don't feel like we landed anywhere.

We have people that want the github noise off of the list.

We have people that want to be able to comment on patches on the list,
but not using the current workflow.

What should we do here? I'm still inclined to promote discussion by
removing the github output from the dev list and switching that to the
commit list. What it sounds like we really want is some magic github
+ mailing list integration that doesn't exists to the best of my
knowledge.

We also got a pretty small sample size in response, so I'm sure that
making any executive decision will sit well.

Round 2 of discussion? Does anybody have any actions proposed that we
can easily take now?

Mike

[Jo Rhett]

Why not encourage both? Separate the lists but suggest that replying to a commit message on the dev list is encouraged. Or if you can, set reply-to on the commit messages to go back to dev ;-)

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[Daniel Pittman]

I think Jo is on the money: that seems like the smallest step, and work trying.

If that isn't perfect, we can take another small step to something better.

--
Daniel Pittman
⎋ Puppet Labs Developer – http://puppetlabs.com
♲ Made with 100 percent post-consumer electrons

[Matthaus Litteken]

+1

[Adrien Thebo]

I'm way late to the party, but +1 on this.

On Apr 23, 12:22 pm, Jo Rhett <jrh...@netconsonance.com> wrote:
> Why not encourage both? Separate the lists but suggest that replying to a commit message on the dev list is encouraged. Or if you can, set reply-to on the commit messages to go back to dev ;-)
>
> On Apr 23, 2012, at 12:19 PM, Michael Stahnke wrote:
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
> > So, after a week of contemplation, I don't feel like we landed anywhere.
>
> > We have people that want the github noise off of the list.
>
> > We have people that want to be able to comment on patches on the list,
> > but not using the current workflow.
>
> > What should we do here?  I'm still inclined to promote discussion by
> > removing the github output from the dev list and switching that to the
> > commit list.  What it sounds like we really want is some magic github
> > + mailing list integration that doesn't exists to the best of my
> > knowledge.
>
> > We also got a pretty small sample size in response, so I'm sure that
> > making any executive decision will sit well.
>
> > Round 2 of discussion?  Does anybody have any actions proposed that we
> > can easily take now?
>
> > Mike
>
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[Eric Sorenson]

Not to be a pest, but um...whatever happened with this? Seemed like the response was pretty unanimously in favour.

[Daniel Pittman]

We expect to have that done by the end of this week.

(Don't ask why it turns out to be so hard. I don't even want to think
about it. ;)

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