Re: A Forum for Guix Users

[Simon Tournier]

Hi,

On Tue, 18 Jul 2023 at 06:45, Distopico <distopico@riseup.net> wrote:

> - Forum: A good place for beginner an non-technical user (I guess all
> Guix user require some technical knowledge), also a good place for
> create history and user documentation/solutions.

> - Mailing List: For contributors, developers, and more long-terms
>   questions, as well more advanced users.

Please do not take me wrong because my message could appear “elitist”.
I hope I have a track record about welcoming newcomers, answering on
help-guix mailing and helping on various other forums or media.
 
Well, GNU Guix is currently a technical project and any user will have
their hand dirty.  If you are non-technical and not able to deal with
emails, then sadly GNU Guix is not for you.  My point of view is: a
forum will not help in a better way the newcomers.

Moreover, the maintenance cost of such forum is not free.  You speak
about history but most forums are ephemeral because they are based on
kid-cool web tech, and to my knowledge, mailing list preserves much
better the history.

Even, most of the help provided by answering to a question is also
ephemeral.  I am very doubtful about the value in history for most of
the question/answers.  As an exercise, for instance, none of any
messages from December 2016 [1] seems helpful for today troubles.  And
you can pick any other past months.  If we want to help newcomer, then,
IMHO, the best is to extract the rare “universal-enough” question/answer
and pinpoint them – for instance, improve the documentation (manual or
cookbook).  Maybe, I am wrong…

My point is that forum + mailing lists will scatter where people who
answer have to look.  And you cannot know in advance if the question
will become a long-term question.  In that rare case, I do not speak
about the discoverability of such configuration using forum + mailing
lists.

That’s said, some people are not going via “official” media for
reporting difficulties and asking help.  Instead, they are using stuff
like Reddit, Stackoverflow and the like.  And as experimented users, in
to order to strengthen the community, we should roam on these platforms
(quickly answer and/or friendly redirect to “official” media if needed).

Last, I advocate for using the most sober technology for exchanging
pieces of text and not require the most modern hardware and/or some
resource-hungry software (client and server) that many forums implicitly
require.  An example: try to follow Discourse (e.g.,
https://discuss.ocaml.org) forum with few-featured Web-browser or even
try to deal with it with intermittent internet connection.


1: https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/help-guix/2016-12/threads.html


> on the other hand I think that the mailing lists create a more conducive
> environment for debate than the forum itself, but again, for new user a
> Forum is a better place or to find quick solutions which on Irc are hard
> to find.

I concur at some points.  However, I disagree with the proposal that a
new forum would be the answer.  From my point of view, we should keep
the “official” interaction as it is using mailing lists and we need to,
time to time, roam on already existing well-known forums instead of
creating yet another dedicated space.

(Here, I speak about GNU Guix.  My answer is different for specific usage
of Guix in some context as in scientific research because, although
hacker and researcher communities can be joined as it had been done in
10 Years of Guix [2], these both communities have subtle differences. :-))


2: 10years.guix.gnu.org/


Cheers,
simon