Designing our conversation

[edreamleo]

Description

@lieryan I'd like to use Rope's issues for status reports and other general topics.

Experiments with Rope's wiki and rope.leo did not turn out well:

• The wiki was too public. I have moved all the Engineering Notebook posts to rope.leo.
• But rope.leo is neither accessible nor interactive.
• I have kept the discussions in my PRs focused only on the new code.

In short, I have been feeling a bit out of communication.

Keeping in touch via new issues seems like the best way forward. Your thoughts, please.

[lieryan]

That's been in my mind as well. The Wiki doesn't seem to be the right place or format for your ENBs, the Wiki isn't designed for large number of pages (it doesn't have any hierarchy) and you can't have a proper conversation/comment there.

As for being public, since it's an open source community project, I think it's fine to have as much as possible conversation or notes being public. Just as long as people reading them are aware of the context of such notes being more of a shared research notes and aren't necessarily "documentation" proper.

Before you removed those ENRs from the Wiki, I had been wanting to talk about this as well. My best candidates is what about Github Discussions for those?

I don't think GitHub issues are suitable for those either. I'd prefer to keep Issues more for actual bugs and actionable tickets.

[edreamleo]

@lieryan Yes. Let's try discussions. I created #667 before I read your reply. We can close #667 immediately if you like.

[edreamleo]

@lieryan I'm happy with trying discussions. Otoh, big projects like pylint and mypy use issues for all communications. Leo has an a separate "forum", but I'm happy enough to discuss anything in a Leo issue.

[lieryan]

Github Issue, PRs, and Discussions are all really effectively just Issues under the hood (they all share the same numbering scheme, and can be referenced by #<issue-number> syntax anywhere in Github). They just have different statuses and Discussions allow comment threads to be nested for more complex discussions, while PR is just issues with a branch attached to it.

The way I see it, I don't particularly mind having discussions on pretty much any topic on any one of those, but I think with Issues/PRs, there's an expectation that there's something actionable/decision that comes with it. At some point they need to be closed and resolved. Issues are like a Todo list, closing and reducing the number of issues/PRs down (or as close as possible) to zero should be a team goal.

Discussions don't have such expectations, it can be more open ended. Unless a discussion thread becomes too toxic or invite spam, it doesn't need to be closed.

That said, issues can become discussions and discussions can spawn issues. If an on topic discussion happens in an Issue or PR comments and that they naturally fit there, they can be discussed there. I don't think there should be a strict enforcement of where discussions happens is necessary.

[edreamleo]

@lieryan Thanks for your comments. I'll use discussions and issues as you suggest.