Phabricator has some quirks when it comes to design discussions IMHO, I think there’s a good chance this forum does a better job. I’d propose we try to use this forum for a few design tasks to see how it works.
A new category “User Interface” would make sense for this.
Here’s why I think this Discourse forum may be better suited for (complex) design discussions:
Better handling of long discussions
Better markdown support
Yay, I can finally add nicely aligned descriptions to list items. Not possible in Phabricator
Liking and bookmarking (to mark as read) of posts.
New topics get saved as drafts
On Phabricator, you have to keep the page open when creating a new task. Close it and your input is lost.
No overly annoying change logs & notifications
No more “Julian Eisel (Severin) updated the task description.” on every edit. This may be useful in some cases, but also adds a lot of visual clutter making the conversation hard to follow.
Overall better looking and easier to read formatting.
As long as final design decisions aren’t happening here, then ending up in master/blender2.8, think it could be fine for more informal design discussions to happen here.
A summary and proposal should go via official channels still.
How to avoid Blender-Artists style 10+ page design discussions that least nowhere.
Or do we consider that acceptable?
Also, if proposals are acceptable here - how to avoid wish-list style posts from non developers? (that also tend to lead nowhere).
We could have a rule of thumb that design threads are fine as long as a developer who intends to do it starts them.
Sorry about that. I updated your level to “leader”, for being a core developer and all. TBH, we haven’t had any discussion yet in the back channels about all these ranks, so others please feel free to nerf his level again
Isn’t that the whole point of Discourse dev talk forum, to be the new “official channel”? Not that it matters to me either way, or anything, but rather I am just confused what the point of this forum is, if not for official planning and such?
Using polls could help. It would cut the +1 posts (KDE does this in the VDG forum). That said, the only way to avoid 10-page long discussions would be moderation and clear rules.
Having a “patch idea” tag where we can bounce ideas with you (the devs) before doing any coding would be great.
The number of places maintainers need to keep an eye on can become an issue.
For now bf-committers and developer.blender.org are used, adding a 3rd place feels a bit too haphazard since its easy to miss posts on a forum, they aren’t arranged by projects… etc.
While this is an official channel for discussion, I think we should view this similar to #blendercoders IRC channel. We can chat about stuff, but final decisions still go via more formal channels.
Might I also mention the possibility of Discourse addons. I am not familiar on what is all out there, aside from our OAuth2 plugin, but if there are any interesting things (voting, etc.) that you would like to try, be sure to mention it and I can see about getting it installed.
For as long as this site is still a test - agree. But once this goes out of testing stage, I think it would be even more confusing if we have design discussion here and then copy&paste the result to developer.blender.org. People will start replying to both.
Unless… We could close the thread once the design is agreed on, and then move it to developer.blender.org for devs to start working on it.
LibreOffice does something similar, they have Whiteboards for design tasks, and Blueprints for finished designs that pend implementation.
I actually don’t expect this to be much of an issue really. The same point could be made about developer.blender.org, design tasks there are quite similar to regular forum threads. Also, I think it’s job of the UI team module owners to ensure discussions actually lead somewhere by making decisions if needed.
But even if we get into longer discussions, Discourse has better ways of filtering out less important posts, or posts with less agreement, mainly using likes or polls.
Agree, for now that’s probably best. Or at least there should be a developer ready to work on it.
First of all, if a maintainer wants to discuss some minor change, then commits, this isn’t so different to discussing on IRC or in person. No issue there.
For larger changes that may be contentious or impact other module owners - this should stay on developer.blender.org. There is no need to copy-paste large chunks of the thread. It can be summarized into a design task - linking to the forum if thats relevant.
Note this is basically what Rust does (issue tracker for official signoff, forum for discussion).
