Stream: committers
Topic: Splitting this stream
Lloyd McKenzie (Aug 23 2018 at 23:20):
It's been pointed out by an "infrequent" committer that our expectation to activeliy monitor this stream is a bit much for some to manage. (It's not uncommon to have 100+ posts a day, though most of those are posted by bots. Our real intention with the "if you want committer privileges, you must monitor this stream" is:
1. check to make sure you didn't break the build
2. ensure you're up-to-date with any important announcements about tool changes, commit rule changes, freezes, deadlines, etc.
For #1, you only need to actively monitor during the time-period you're doing commits. #2 could be moved to a separate "committer announcements" stream which would be lower traffic (probably <5 messages/week on average). The main stream would be used for things like "tx server is down" or "I have this bug" and similar discussions as well as the standard bot-notification streams.
Thoughts/opinions on making such a split?
Sarah Gaunt (Aug 23 2018 at 23:40):
I think that would be awesome - I have a very hard time keeping up...
Jean Duteau (Aug 23 2018 at 23:44):
I agree. If I've been gone for a week, I just "read all" because there is too much noise to find the signal
Grahame Grieve (Aug 24 2018 at 01:38):
an alternative is to puch all the bot notifications to committer-bots and leave this one as is
John Moehrke (Aug 24 2018 at 11:58):
Ignoring the bots is easy, zulip allows you to grab a stream and mark all read. The hard to catch are the inspiration found within a discussion about how to unbreak the build. No idea how to capture those unless those participating can summarize their ah-ha moment onto a dedicated thread for those.
Lloyd McKenzie (Aug 24 2018 at 15:35):
There's still 20-30 comments a day that aren't bot-generated and 95%+ of that is not useful to people who aren't actively committing. There are absolutely situations where a problem that someone had isn't relevent to you but becomes relevent to you when you run into the same problem 3 months later, but I'm not sure that's sufficient justification to tell people they must read all of the discussion - because the reality is they won't, and when they "mark read" they miss the important announcements too.
John Moehrke (Aug 24 2018 at 15:57):
Unfortunately sometimes those discussions have happened in the bot threads...
Melva Peters (Aug 24 2018 at 16:08):
My preference is to leave as is. I'd rather look in one stream that have another one to monitor. Agree with @John Moehrke sometimes discussions happen in bot threads and also happen in other streams where they shouldn't be happening.
Lloyd McKenzie (Aug 24 2018 at 16:39):
We can shut down discussions happening in the bot threads if we decide that's problematic. I think the first question we need to answer is "what are our expectations for non-frequent committers in terms of actually reading content - what do they HAVE to read?" The second question is "How do we make it easy for them to read that without having to read everything else?"
Claude Nanjo (Aug 24 2018 at 18:31):
I think reviewing the thread for information that might be useful is okay, if I can find it of course, but it does not replace the need for some resource that committers should be familiar with and thoroughly read prior to committing. This thread is long and chances that I will find all I need to properly commit are slim especially when working on tight timelines. However, reading a set of guidelines, rules, best practices and regularly reviewing such a document, would not be onerous for a sporadic committer like me.
Grahame Grieve (Sep 01 2018 at 03:40):
so, where did we end up with this?
Lloyd McKenzie (Sep 01 2018 at 04:51):
Seems to be a balance of opinions in favor and against. I don't really understand the issue with splitting the stream - for those who want to monitor everything, it doesn't change the amount of effort and it's no harder to track the same content split to multiple places. We'll have to police to make sure "important" stuff is on the key-info stream and general debate/discussion is on the other. If you want to influence what happens, you need to be on both. If you just want to know the rules, you can just be on the low traffic one.
Elliot Silver (Sep 04 2018 at 19:04):
One of the criticism was that discussions end up mixed in on the status topics. Is it possible to create a read-only stream for the build status, and force discussion back here?
Lloyd McKenzie (Sep 04 2018 at 19:08):
No. But we can nudge people to post in the right place (like we do with announcements)
Josh Mandel (Sep 04 2018 at 19:10):
Why isn't it possible? This would be a nice idea, to add a #committers/notifications stream or such-like.
Josh Mandel (Sep 04 2018 at 19:10):
Are there concerns about this? We could migrate all notifications over to the new channel, and save this one for discussions among humans...
Lloyd McKenzie (Sep 04 2018 at 19:10):
Our objective with the split is to have the discussion somewhere that most people don't monitor
Josh Mandel (Sep 04 2018 at 19:11):
No -- to have it somewhere that's monitored _differently_.
Lloyd McKenzie (Sep 04 2018 at 19:11):
And to only have key announcements rule changes in the low-volume one
Josh Mandel (Sep 04 2018 at 19:12):
I'm confused. Let's back up for a sec: today, #committers is used for important announcements like rule changes, and also for trivial automated announcements like "build #19824 succeeded".
Lloyd McKenzie (Sep 04 2018 at 19:12):
People will have to monitor the low volume one all the time - or read everything when they want to catch up and start publishing again. The high volume one will only need to be monitored if you're actively publishing.
Josh Mandel (Sep 04 2018 at 19:12):
This makes it hard for people to monitor properly
Josh Mandel (Sep 04 2018 at 19:12):
So @Elliot Silver was asking to split this stream accordingly; are you saying we should do that, or we shouldn't, @Lloyd McKenzie ?
Lloyd McKenzie (Sep 04 2018 at 19:13):
If you're only publishing for a couple of months out of the year, you don't want to see the notifications, but you also don't want to see non-critical discussion
Lloyd McKenzie (Sep 04 2018 at 19:13):
(e.g. like this thread :))
Josh Mandel (Sep 04 2018 at 19:13):
Right... I think we agree on this.
Josh Mandel (Sep 04 2018 at 19:13):
So why not split the channel accordingly?
Lloyd McKenzie (Sep 04 2018 at 19:42):
That's the proposal - but read-only isn't going to help us. We want discussions on the "busy" thread, but we'll need non-automated posts to the "low-volume critical" thread, so neither can be read-only.
John Moehrke (Sep 04 2018 at 19:54):
seems those of us involved in 'committers' should be aware enough to not post into the bot stream ... right? do we really need to somehow mark it readonly?
Lloyd McKenzie (Sep 04 2018 at 20:00):
Posting on the bot stream won't be an issue. The thing we'll have to manage is "no discussion in the low-bandwidth stream".
Lloyd McKenzie (Sep 04 2018 at 20:01):
And the other thing we'll have to watch for is "hey, that's important - can you please copy it to the low-bandwidth stream?"
Josh Mandel (Sep 04 2018 at 20:40):
OK. I heard "read-only" as less literal than you did (especially since Zulip doesn't have a concept like that). I heard it as "a place where most of the posting is from automated bots".
Lloyd McKenzie (Sep 04 2018 at 21:00):
That won't fix the issue. We need to split the discussion part from the rules part. The non-frequent committers don't want to wade through 600 posts of discussion about how the build works and various build errors to glean the few tidbits of "rules you must follow" or "hints you should know". Frequent committers will care about the bot stuff and discussion stuff in equal measure.
Grahame Grieve (Sep 04 2018 at 21:02):
sounds to me like we should have committers/notifications and committers/announce
Eric Haas (Sep 04 2018 at 22:26):
why fix what isn't broke , in for a dime in for a dollar and don't whine about committers channel.
Grahame Grieve (Sep 04 2018 at 22:31):
well, some people are not in for a dollar. And I don't think that we should say all or nothing in a volunteer organization. Also, IG authors are definitely not in for a dollar on the main build
Lloyd McKenzie (Sep 04 2018 at 22:35):
And the reality is that if the streams are too busy, people will just mark them as "all read" and miss the (few) critical pieces they should have seen.
Eric Haas (Sep 04 2018 at 23:30):
I forgot about the IG Authoring bit, I'd migrate the ig-build bot to the #IG Creation stream.
Lloyd McKenzie (Sep 04 2018 at 23:53):
IG Creation is of interest to lots of folks who aren't involved in committing HL7 content. I think it's better to leave that one where it is.
Josh Mandel (Sep 05 2018 at 03:21):
I think the suggestion was to keep the discussion where it is and to also move the notifications over there (or to a distinct, related stream).
Lloyd McKenzie (Sep 05 2018 at 03:29):
My preference is the following: Add a new committers-annouce stream. Sign up every person who has committer access to the main build or to an IG to that stream with an expectation that all committers SHALL keep up and read every post - perhaps by turning on notifications. It will be used only for high-priority notifications around freezes, tooling and similar issues. Require that discussion about such posts occur on the regular committers thread. Keep the committers list as it stands with all bot notifications and commentary discussion and allow discussion to happen within what topics the users wish. I.e. ig-build remains right where it is.
Grahame Grieve (Sep 05 2018 at 08:09):
ok,
- Lloyd, you know who, so please create a committers/announce stream, and subscribe the appropriate parties
- Josh, you care for the bots... please create a committers/notifications stream and move the 3 bots there
Josh Mandel (Sep 05 2018 at 12:40):
Perfect. Will do.
Lloyd McKenzie (Sep 05 2018 at 14:52):
Zulip gave me the option of just adding everyone from the existing committers stream - where everyone should already have been - so I did that instead.
Lloyd McKenzie (Sep 05 2018 at 16:15):
@Josh Mandel We don't want the notifications coming to the /announce stream. We want them on a separate /notification stream
Josh Mandel (Sep 05 2018 at 16:18):
I know -- working on it.
Josh Mandel (Sep 05 2018 at 16:26):
There.
Josh Mandel (Sep 05 2018 at 16:26):
Lloyd McKenzie (Sep 05 2018 at 17:05):
Can you subscribe everyone who's on committers? All committers should be subscribed, though some might choose to mute the stream
Josh Mandel (Sep 05 2018 at 17:40):
Hmm, there's a way to do it when creating a new stream. I'm looking for how to bulk update membership after the fact.
Josh Mandel (Sep 05 2018 at 17:48):
Delete and re-created with 175 users from here.
Grahame Grieve (Sep 05 2018 at 19:58):
thanks both
Elliot Silver (Nov 14 2018 at 23:10):
Would it be possible to split out the tracker notifications from #committers/notification? I have no interest in check ins or builds, but find it interesting to see what tracker items are submitted. It probably doesn't need to be under the committers/* hierarchy.
Or is the switch to Jira imminent and this could be done at the same time?
Lloyd McKenzie (Nov 15 2018 at 07:48):
Imminent is relative, but should be within the next 2 months.
Grahame Grieve (Nov 15 2018 at 08:55):
@Josh Mandel is it easy to make it a new stream?
Josh Mandel (Nov 16 2018 at 08:35):
We can make it a new stream, though I'd prefer ot cover this at the same time as the Jira changeover. Also a quick note @Elliot Silver if you really have no interest in checkins or builds, you can always mute those topics.
Josh Mandel (Nov 16 2018 at 08:35):
(Er, though I see -- not so easily because some of these topics are named after individual PRs, so you can't preemptively mute them.)
Josh Mandel (Nov 16 2018 at 08:36):
Should we plan to make the new stream (when we changeover) called committers/tracker-items or some-such?
Lloyd McKenzie (Nov 16 2018 at 08:37):
We tend to end up with a topic per branch, which makes muting hard...
Grahame Grieve (Nov 16 2018 at 09:09):
it's actually really annoying to have a topic per PR
Grahame Grieve (Nov 16 2018 at 09:09):
but I assume this is a zulip decided thing.
Grahame Grieve (Nov 16 2018 at 09:09):
I'm ok to wait for changeover, though this is a convenience issue?
Rob Hausam (Nov 16 2018 at 13:49):
Could we look at whether we could have a single committers/notification topic for pull requests, like we do for tracker items and build status?
Elliot Silver (Nov 16 2018 at 16:57):
@Josh Mandel Thanks. This isn't an urgent need, I don't mind waiting.
Last updated: Apr 12 2022 at 19:14 UTC
