Re: How can we improve the Changes Process?

On 6/28/26 3:21 PM, Maxwell G wrote:
> Hi everyone,
> 
> I've been thinking about the Changes Process recently and how we can 
> improve it for Change Owners, Change Wranglers, FESCo members, and 
> participants in Change discussion and feedback. I'm not officially 
> proposing to change anything now, but I wanted to put some ideas out 
> there and see how people feel about this or if anybody has other ideas/ 
> thoughts/opinions.

Here are some takeaways I had so far. I did my best to attribute new 
ideas to those who came up with them :). Thanks everyone who chimed in!

1. I should've started with a more detailed problem statement so the 
context behind this was clearer to everyone. Aoife raised some helpful 
questions surrounding this. I also provided links to the FESCo tickets 
about process issues that have come up in response to Pierre.

2. There was some support for adopting a new git-based approach and also 
some feedback in support of the current web editing workflow provided by 
the Wiki. Some of the pro-wiki feedback seems more general, though, and 
directed at replacing Wiki-based documentation with git repos and Antora 
as a whole, which has already happened elsewhere in the project. Other 
ideas included:

- Neal mentioned it might be possible to add markdown support to the 
wiki. I'm not sure how feasible this is to implement, and it wouldn't 
solve the problem of validating structured metadata stored in Changes.
- Creating a bespoke web app to handle the Changes process (from 
mkolman). Discussions about whether this was a good idea or feasible to 
maintain long term (and then other tangential discussions about IdM and 
authentication in Fedora) ensued.
- Can we use Forgejo issue forms for this (kevin)? I didn't have a 
chance to answer this subthread directly, but I'm not sure this would 
work well for more involved Changes where someone wants to work on a 
draft or collaborate with others before submitting.
- Matthew mentioned some Discourse features that we could utilize to 
make a Discourse-native Changes Process and integrate it with a 
git-based workflow/archive. I'm still weary about building a process 
around the Discourse platform.

3. The issues presented by the split between the Wiki, MLs, Discourse, 
fesco/tickets, FESCo meeting discussion, and so on were emphasized, 
especially when data or formatting gets messed up between the steps or 
discussion gets fractured.

4. The initial Change feedback stage being split between devel@ and 
Discourse creates a frustrating burden for Change Owners and other 
people trying to follow the discussion. I liked bcotton's idea of 
keeping discussion on the devel list only and posting a read-only digest 
to Discourse, and I would also suggest including links to Hyperkitty to 
respond to the associated topics on the list. After three years, I don't 
believe this split-brain approach for development discussion is working, 
and I don't see us replacing the entire devel list with Discourse in the 
near future, since that would alienate existing contributors. There was 
some good discussion about the issues with Discourse Change discussions 
today in #devel on Matrix, as well.

I'm not sure whether making future Change announcements on Discourse 
read-only should be a Change Proposal or just a formal FESCo proposal 
after some on-list discussion as occurred. The original Discourse 
discussion proposal from three years ago did not go through the Changes 
Process, but maybe this proposal should. If anybody would like to co-own 
a Change about this, please reach out.

I'd like to come back to point 2. about the Wiki-based process as a 
separate proposal, but I think the way Changes are discussed is the 
larger pain point right now, so I'll focus on that first.

All the best,
Maxwell
-- 
_______________________________________________
devel mailing list -- [email protected]
To unsubscribe send an email to [email protected]
Fedora Code of Conduct: https://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/project/code-of-conduct/
List Guidelines: https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Mailing_list_guidelines
List Archives: https://lists.fedoraproject.org/archives/list/[email protected]
Do not reply to spam, report it: https://forge.fedoraproject.org/infra/tickets/issues/new