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> IRC is the default chat mechanism for Debian, but younger people do not use IRC; in Brazil, they use Telegram instead. This is I think one of the major reaso

> IRC is the default chat mechanism for Debian, but younger people do not use IRC; in Brazil, they use Telegram instead. This is I think one of the major reasons why a lot of older open source projects are absolutely starved for developers in their 20s and 30s. A lot of the mail based workflows or IRC based communication is just utterly foreign to any young person and also objectively atrocious in many ways. Having to rely on a chat service that doesn't let you see offline messages without setting up a proxy in 2024 is just not comprehensible to anyone used to modern services, for good reason. It's very obvious that open source projects that embrace github, discord, social media are able to do much better and attract contributors much more effectively. Purism is nice and all but if most of your core maintainers are in their 50s and 60s which is a reality now for a lot of long lived projects with no replacement coming up you're looking at the whole thing dying in a generation.

davisr 2y ago
You've outed yourself as not knowing why IRC and email are the established media. IRC is meant to be live chat rooms -- and explicitly not persistent conversation. That is the whole point. For persistence, use email. These are the only two protocols required to cover most all needs of communication. It's the simplicity and stability that is why they are preferred, and their usage translates to higher quality development -- much higher quality than is usually ever found on GitHub or Discord. Also, putting the keys to one's communication into proprietary platforms, like GitHub and Discord, is a horrifyingly bad idea. Maybe it helps graduates of computer science work faster, but graduates of computer science also are (usually) embarrassingly bad hacks at what they do.
- duskwuff 2y ago
  > IRC is meant to be live chat rooms -- and explicitly not persistent conversation. That is the whole point. For persistence, use email. Is there a compelling reason for those to be separate, beyond "we've always done it this way"?
  - davisr 2y ago
    Yes, because the live chat that happens on IRC is meant to be ephemeral. It's a place where you go to hang out with people, shoot the shit, or ask off-the-cuff things. Most IRC moderators have a no-logging policy because it's supposed to be a shared space that people "move into and out of". Email is where official business happens. That's where debug logs are pasted, and people can reply on a point-by-point basis, with quotes, references, and attachments. It's meant to be high quality/detail and searchable. That's why mailing lists have archives. When IRC and email aren't separate, you get Slack and Discord -- places that don't do either off-the-cuff chat, or searchable documentation, particularly well.
    - daedrdev 2y ago
      Discord in my experience is almost too good at off-the-cuff chatting.
- daedrdev 2y ago
  > and their usage translates to higher quality development -- much higher quality than is usually ever found on GitHub or Discord There are plenty of great software projects with development run using both discord and GitHub. The advantages are that it allows one to run both development and a grow a community, and more importantly it brings in massive numbers of young developers who will one day become important figures in a long term project. Simply ignoring where young developers are today is not a good idea imo. The tradeoffs you said are real, but the benefits I argue are real as well. And it's easy to make a discord bot to have all messages be duplicated in another application, such as irc, or record them.
rstuart4133 2y ago
> in Brazil, they use Telegram instead Telegram is a proprietary protocol, run by servers controlled by private entity. That is a complete anathema Debian. If IRC is replaced, it will be by open source, open access, probably running on hardware controlled by Debian, and done in a completely transparent way. That takes a lot of effort to get going. Nonetheless, experimental servers have been set up, and everyone invited to use them. The Debian developers voted with their feet. They kept them firmly in place, on IRC. To be fair, IRC works. Email works. Young entrepreneurs, jailing of CEO's by the French Police, and skilful marketing will attract the young to newer platforms, and so current flavours of the month you mentioned - they will become the IRC's of the next generation. When looked at in that vein, the constant churn to the new shiny platform looks like a very uninviting hamster wheel to the existing Debian Developers who just want to get shit done. And as it happens, the youngsters seem to have no trouble adapting themselves all sorts of new software they haven't seen before - like IRC. Compared to the effort they must go to become a Debian Developer (you have to pass an exam of sorts, and there are a lot of new Debian specific tools you have to use), using IRC is a very, very small road bump.

davisr 2y ago

You've outed yourself as not knowing why IRC and email are the established media. IRC is meant to be live chat rooms -- and explicitly not persistent conversation. That is the whole point. For persistence, use email. These are the only two protocols required to cover most all needs of communication. It's the simplicity and stability that is why they are preferred, and their usage translates to higher quality development -- much higher quality than is usually ever found on GitHub or Discord. Also, putting the keys to one's communication into proprietary platforms, like GitHub and Discord, is a horrifyingly bad idea. Maybe it helps graduates of computer science work faster, but graduates of computer science also are (usually) embarrassingly bad hacks at what they do.

duskwuff 2y ago
> IRC is meant to be live chat rooms -- and explicitly not persistent conversation. That is the whole point. For persistence, use email. Is there a compelling reason for those to be separate, beyond "we've always done it this way"?
- davisr 2y ago
  Yes, because the live chat that happens on IRC is meant to be ephemeral. It's a place where you go to hang out with people, shoot the shit, or ask off-the-cuff things. Most IRC moderators have a no-logging policy because it's supposed to be a shared space that people "move into and out of". Email is where official business happens. That's where debug logs are pasted, and people can reply on a point-by-point basis, with quotes, references, and attachments. It's meant to be high quality/detail and searchable. That's why mailing lists have archives. When IRC and email aren't separate, you get Slack and Discord -- places that don't do either off-the-cuff chat, or searchable documentation, particularly well.
  - daedrdev 2y ago
    Discord in my experience is almost too good at off-the-cuff chatting.
daedrdev 2y ago
> and their usage translates to higher quality development -- much higher quality than is usually ever found on GitHub or Discord There are plenty of great software projects with development run using both discord and GitHub. The advantages are that it allows one to run both development and a grow a community, and more importantly it brings in massive numbers of young developers who will one day become important figures in a long term project. Simply ignoring where young developers are today is not a good idea imo. The tradeoffs you said are real, but the benefits I argue are real as well. And it's easy to make a discord bot to have all messages be duplicated in another application, such as irc, or record them.

rstuart4133 2y ago

> in Brazil, they use Telegram instead Telegram is a proprietary protocol, run by servers controlled by private entity. That is a complete anathema Debian. If IRC is replaced, it will be by open source, open access, probably running on hardware controlled by Debian, and done in a completely transparent way. That takes a lot of effort to get going. Nonetheless, experimental servers have been set up, and everyone invited to use them. The Debian developers voted with their feet. They kept them firmly in place, on IRC. To be fair, IRC works. Email works. Young entrepreneurs, jailing of CEO's by the French Police, and skilful marketing will attract the young to newer platforms, and so current flavours of the month you mentioned - they will become the IRC's of the next generation. When looked at in that vein, the constant churn to the new shiny platform looks like a very uninviting hamster wheel to the existing Debian Developers who just want to get shit done. And as it happens, the youngsters seem to have no trouble adapting themselves all sorts of new software they haven't seen before - like IRC. Compared to the effort they must go to become a Debian Developer (you have to pass an exam of sorts, and there are a lot of new Debian specific tools you have to use), using IRC is a very, very small road bump.