The current Change Process calls for Changes to be announced on the devel-announce and devel mailing list, followed by a FESCo ticket after at least a week of discussion.

In a message to the devel list last month, I proposed that we transition general development discussion from that list to Fedora Discussion, starting with the Changes process. That discussion seems to have settled down, so I am moving forward with the next step: this formal request to change the location of Change discussion.

My message above goes into further detail, but in summary I am proposing this because:

• Many Fedora contributors, for various reasons, do not keep up with devel list
• We're seeing a lot of Fedora development conversations scatter to ticket trackers for various teams. This immediate step won't solve that, but is one step towards bringing things closer together.
  • I do hope it will help reduce people's urge to discuss the change proposals in the FESCo tickets, at least. (We can consider hooking up some automation like https://pagure.io/pagure2discourse/.)
• People can follow Change discussion without necessarily following everything else; at the same time, everything else is (or could be!) easily nearby if wanted.
• As, I think actually demonstrated in some way by how this particular thread went, big devel list threads aren't really healthy. Discourse has features which can help with big discussions.
  • In the above, several sub-topics emerged — a discussion of the mailman3 infrastructure, a lot on how to use Discourse features and particularly the email interface, various questions about why the "mailing list mode" feature is disabled on our site currently, and some things about how decisions are made in Fedora. None of these are bad conversations: they're just better served standing on their own as linked conversations. It's worth nothing that mailing list threading doesn't really help -- some of these things kept coming up in different branches. For Change proposals, the main topic can stay focused to the change itself, and linked topics used for other ideas and tangents.
  • We can moderate comments that are really out of line, keeping conversation civil and welcoming
  • For Changes in specific: updates to the Change can be noted in edits to the top post, so that it reflects the current proposal at all times. (Or, if preferred, we can make new topics for significant edits and link them.)

The specific proposal is simple:

• Changes will be announced on devel-announce as they are currently
• But discussion will be directed to the corresponding topic under a #change-proposal tag

Anyone who is not interested in the rest of Fedora Discussion but who would like to follow change proposals can mute everything else and "watch" only this tag. As discussed in the thread, this allows for receiving the discussion by email and participation by reply.

I am not currently proposing further active migration of topics from devel list. This is an experiment which we can learn from and adjust -- or back off from, if need be.

For what it's worth, I did some quick (well, no, not quick. tedious. but not in-depth) analysis of each person's response to the devel list thread, and it breaks down roughly like this (by person, not post):

In support:        10
Open to the idea:  17
"Push" concern:    10 
Opposed:            7
Neutral:           18

"In support" includes me.

"Open to the idea" includes various degrees of skepticism (and one or two that are more fatalistic but not hostile).

"'Push' concern" is those who feel their own participation will drop because email comes to them. I hope we can mitigate this. (I tried to limit this count to folks for whom this was the only voiced objection, but it is a bit subjective.)

"Opposed" is various degrees of vehemence.

"Neutral" commenters did not express an opinion -- either talking about Discourse features generally, or off-topic.