GitHub Discussions and JuliaLang teams

#1

Recently GitHub announced the release of Discussions for GitHub teams. Seeing this, I immediately thought of Julia and the development process, especially the prevalence of large “discussion” tickets. I try my best to keep up with Julia development at a high-level, but I don’t (unfortunately) have time to follow each and every ticket. I’d hoped that this forum would allow me to at least know when large changes are happening, but that’s not been working out so well. Most recently, were it not for @ScottPJones post on the redesign of ones/zeros/etc., I don’t think I would’ve know that was even in progress, even though the related GitHub issues seem to have been active for a while.

So, I would like to suggest that high-level design changes be moved to discussions, leaving tickets for more task-based, code-related changes. I would like to, but it seems like discussions are limited to participation from team members only, and I am not (yet) a member of the JuliaLang team. There was mention in the GitHub announcement post of “nested teams”, so perhaps one solution would be to have a JuliaLang team on GitHub for “enthusiasts”?

Interested in opinions and/or suggestions for someone with a keen interest in Julia’s development, but who cannot (yet) dedicate full-time effort to the task.

#2

I find the UI around discussions a bit strange. Apparently you need to create teams first in order to create a discussion for that team… but GitHub de-emphasized teams for access controls some time ago, so we now have no teams on JuliaLang – or maybe that was some other person-grouping feature? I dunno.

Also, how is a discussion on a repo different than an issue intended for discussion? Those seem like roughly the same thing from what I can tell. Perhaps I need to try it out, but it’s unclear to me how the discussions feature improves the experience over having discussions on issues. I suppose it can be nice if you really want to keep the issues list focused on bug reports and feature requests.

#3

Also that non-team-members cannot participate seems a bit too elitist (although it would help the focus). Maybe the Juleps should be used more for those high level discussions?

#4

Are you aware of github pulse/insight? The following links give an immediate daily/halfweekly/weekly… list of what is being (hotly) discussed at the moment. Most large changes have been covered there afaics. (And in my opinion this quite nicely solves the ‘keep-up-with-Julia-dev’ objective.)

[Edit: updated link, didn’t jump to the correct location before (despite trying out :-()]