For the past 20 years or so, GTK used IRC and mailing lists for discussions related to the project. Over the years, use of email for communication has declined, and the overhead of maintaining the infrastructure has increased; sending email to hundreds or thousands of people has become increasingly indistinguishable from spam, in the eyes of service providers, and GNOME had to try and ask for exceptions—which are not easy to get, and are quite easy to be revoked. On top of that, the infrastructure in use for managing mailing lists is quite old and crumbly, and it’s unnecessarily split into various sub-categories that make following discussions harder than necessary.
After discussions among the GTK team, with the GNOME infrastructure maintainers, and with the GTK community at large, we decided to start a trial run of Discourse as a replacement for mailing lists, first and foremost, and as a way to provide an official location for the GTK community to discuss the development of, and with, GTK—as well as the rest of the core GNOME platform: GLib, Pango, GdkPixbuf, etc.
You can find the Discourse instance on discourse.gnome.org. On it, you can use the Platform and Core categories for discussions about the core GNOME platform; you can use the appropriate tags for your topics, and subscribe to the ones you’re interested in.
We’re planning to move some of the pages on the wiki to Discourse as well, especially the ones where we expect feedback from the community.
We’re still working on how to migrate users of the various mailing lists related to GTK, in order to close the lists and have a single venue instead of splitting the community; in the meantime, if you’re subscribed to one or more of these lists:
- gtk-devel-list
- gtk-app-devel-list
- gtk-list
- gtk-i18n-list
then you may want to have a look at Discourse, and join the discussions there.
Thanks for the information… I read that KDE was moving more toward matrix protocol due to ability to bridge with irc, etc. which really seems like some great features. Has GNOME done any testing this way?
@Rik Shaw: We’ve been testing Matrix for a while using the IRC bridge to irc.gnome.org, but we’re still figuring out how to replace IRC; for instance, whether to use our own Matrix instance, or using Mattermost, or have Gitter as a channel for discussions on specific projects.