Yes, they are proprietary, which is not great. But I don't buy the allegation that they are not indexed or searchable. There are very few IMs that provide builtin publicly accessable log indexed or searchable by default. Does every IRC server come with public log? What about Matrix groups? How do discussion there not get lost in timeline?
You can provide public log of them not because they are not proprietary, but that they have API to allow logging. Telegram also has such API, and FWIW our discussion group does have searchable log that you can access here: https://luoxu-web.vercel.app/#g=1264662201 It is not indexable publicly more for privacy concern, again not because the platform is proprietary.
This is not a way to have bug discussions, or record them. Do you really think I could find this information on a search for a similar issue?
Only thing that makes this bug and the process of the debug visible is this blog post.
Another point is I don't think IRC or any instant messaging app is the correct place for this kinds of discussions. Unless important points are logged to some bug reporting tool, or perhaps a mailing list, or to a blog post like this one, they are useless for historic purposes.
So there is nothing about being proprietary, but just about using IM?
I don't fully agree. IMs are a great place to discuss issues in a semi-synchronous way. Telecon or face-to-face meetings are sometimes better in velocity, but IMs have some edge on bringing random people happen to be online into the discussion. And it can also bring a different audience into the issue than bug reporting tools or mailing list.
When this issue was brought into the group, it just took several hours for curious people there to collaboratively find the conclusion. This is something unlikely to happen in any other form of discussions based on my experience.
But I agree that group chat is not a great way to record it, and that's why the findings are recorded on the GitHub issue, and group members also encouraged the author to write this up. Then it got posted on HN and on /r/rust by two different group members as well. (The author's initial posting on HN was mysteriously taken down, so the op here helped posting it again.)
Oh I missed the github issue. My bad. In fact I searched github and probably my github search foo was not good. Sorry to disregard that fact.
If these are already in place I don't have any reservations against using IMs or Discord. In fact this is particularly great sample how this can be done.
- Bug report is in place
- Blog/Article for historic events , documentation and pointers for related info
- Fast communication for debug sessions
I hope you understand my original message was about pointing out a situation where only left overs are history of these chat tools.
There are lots of communities right now just using discord or IM for support, bug reporting or development purposes.
> Reporting is done over discord, which is a proprietary environment which is not indexed, or searchable. Will not be archived.
That's why I don't accept the response "but there's Discord now" whenever I moan about USENET's demise. Back in the days before it, every post was nicely searchable by DejaNews (later Google).
We need to get back to open standards for important communications (e.g. all open source projects that are important to the Internet/WWW stack and core programming and libraries).
However I am more interested/concerned about another part. How the issue is reported/recorded and how the communications are handled.
Reporting is done over discord, which is a proprietary environment which is not indexed, or searchable. Will not be archived.
Communications and deliberations are done over discord and telegram, which is probably worse than discord in this context.
This blog post and the github repository is the lingering remains of them. If Xuanwo did not blog this. It would be lost in timeline.
Isn't this fascinating?