Date: Sat, 18 Apr 2020 11:55:08 -0300
From: Leo <thinkabit.ukim@gmail.com>
To: ~alpine/devel@lists.alpinelinux.org
Subject: Re: mailing lists, processes, modernization
Message-ID: <20200418115508.73b3f2de@enterprise>
In-Reply-To: <66694f73048e047cadbe9e3f715801d8@dereferenced.org>
References: <66694f73048e047cadbe9e3f715801d8@dereferenced.org>
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On Sat, 18 Apr 2020 03:48:25 +0000
"Ariadne Conill" <ariadne@dereferenced.org> wrote:

> Hello,
> 
> When Alpine was first started, we had a single mailing list,
> alpine-devel, which was running on ezmlm.  This served us well for
> many years, but a few years ago, we started to realize that we needed
> to modernize the software being used in order to mitigate various
> security and spam issues with the ezmlm setup.
> 
> This lead to Drew DeVault proposing that Alpine use his Sourcehut
> platform for mailing lists, which we have used for the past 8 months.
>  Initially, this was seen as a good solution for the original
> problems we were having with the ezmlm-based setup, but some have
> discontinued using the mailing lists, in some cases leaving the
> project entirely due to issues the Sourcehut software has processing
> HTML e-mail, which caused incompatibility with popular e-mail clients
> such as the Android GMail client and the iOS EMail client, as well as
> differences in behavior verses the earlier mailing list system
> involving the Sourcehut solution not mailing a copy of the message
> back to its author.
> 
> The reduced participation on the mailing lists, and thus reduced
> adherence to procedure for coordinating system changes have reduced
> its usefulness as single source of truth for tracking system changes.
> 
> Unfortunately, this brings us to a crossroads: mailing lists that are
> boycotted by participants are not a useful communications tool for a
> project, because of the source of truth issue.  In addition, the infra
> team has expressed a desire to migrate all applications they manage to
> run under Docker, a desire not shared by Drew for the Sourcehut
> infrastructure.
> 
> Since adoption of the Sourcehut mailing list platform, we have also
> implemented GitLab as a Git forge.  GitLab features high quality issue
> tracking and integrates with e-mail.  This leads us to my proposal to
> replace development mailing lists with GitLab issues and merge
> requests.
> 

Correct me if I'm wrong (hopefully I am wrong), but e-mail integration
is only for Enterprise Edition.

> Initially, we discussed the aports mailing list.  This has been
> deprecated and replaced with the new mkmr tool[1].  Many users are
> now using the mkmr tool and that effort has been considered largely
> successful.
> 

I'm the author of the mentioned tool and i can say it has basic
functionality mostly working (with a few quirks), you can create (mkmr),
merge (mgmr), and edit (programmatically and interactively, edmr, vimr)
a Merge Request's attributes.

There are a few things missing that are super useful for people used to
SourceHut and E-Mail workflow in general:

- List Merge Requests open
- Comment on Merge Requests and its threads (also resolve them)
- List changes of a merge request before merging
- Checkout a merge request in a local branch

There is also no tooling to deal with issues (comment on an issue,
open/close an issue)

When the above are complete people will be able to have a
decent to good experience contributing to Alpine Linux with only a CLI


> So, now we talk about alpine-devel.  In most cases, it is believed
> that change proposals could simply be tracked and commented on by
> filing issues against the aports project in GitLab.  For larger
> meta-issues, it is proposed that we create a project for meta-issues.
>  This replaces the working side of alpine-devel with a more efficient
> workflow and restores the single source of truth for system changes.
> 
> For the support inquiries that get sent to alpine-devel and
> alpine-user, I propose that we use Discourse forums instead.
> Discourse is more accessible to the average user, featuring mobile
> apps and tons of features.  Discourse also supports e-mail for people
> who still desire to interact with the system using e-mail, but the
> support is limited to replying and creating new threads. This is
> believed to be adequate for die-hard e-mail users, however.
> 

About the email support, i don't see that as a big problem since that
is basically what e-mail can do at all

> That leads us to decommissioning of the Sourcehut platform.  We need
> some mechanism to maintain the list archives for historical reasons,
> as the mailing lists served as a single source of truth for a long
> time.  As the Sourcehut software is a mostly typical Flask
> application, it seems plausible that we could write a script to dump
> the mailing list archives as static HTML pages.  The Sourcehut
> software could then be decommissioned, and maintaining the mailing
> list archive would be of minimal impact to the infra team.
> 
> Thoughts?
> 
> Ariadne