In August 2017, 2 people participated substantially in conversation in the slack.apereo.org #uportal channel. (This is around one fifth as many participants as in June.)
- Andrew Petro
- Christian Murphy
Conversation highlights include:
- Raising awareness of an initial pass at implementing GitLocalize for internationalizing uPortal documentation c.f. uportal-dev@ thread.
- Raising awareness of a branch freeze for the uPortal 4.3.2 release c.f. uportal-dev@ thread.
- Raising awareness of a new GitHub feature for embedding code snippets.
- Raising awareness of a one liner for re-building and re-deploying skins in uPortal 5 (
./gradlew tomcatStop overlays:uPortal:clean overlays:uPortal:tomcatDeploy tomcatStart) - Raising awareness of a tool for trying whether WIP code will pass Travis CI without needing to push.
On Slack
I have concerns about the openness properties of Slack as implemented by Apereo.
- You can’t access it anonymously.
- It’s not Google search indexed.
- Older messages aren’t available even if you log in.
Summarizing the conversations here on apereo.github.io in this anonymously, publicly accessible, and Google-indexable context somewhat mitigates these problems. But not necessarily other problems that make email list communications preferable in open source projects.
Arguably, all of the conversations held in the #uportal Slack channel could have been held via email on uportal-dev@ or uportal-user@ email lists additionally or instead. Some relevant email list threads are linked above.
For myself, I’m convinced that we just shouldn’t use Slack in the Apereo uPortal project. Use the email lists. Possibly look to implementing Discourse for better discussion forums / “email lists”.
See also
- June 2017 uPortal Slack summary (~11 participants)
- July 2017 uPortal Slack summary (~5 participants)