GH Discussions discussion

[joshmoore]

Following on from comments like zarr-developers/zarr-specs#244 (comment) (and my general poor ability to make use of GH Discussions), I've reviewed which repositories in the zarr-developers organization have GH Discussions turned on:

Repo	Count	Purpose	Proposals
Org level	5	Catch-all	1, 4, ???
Blog	4	Used for blog discussions	Keep (only for blog)
Benchmark	6	WG discussion	Keep (WG only)
community	N/A	Redirects to Org	N/A
zarr-python	Lots	Misc (some spec stuff)	2, 3, 4, ???
zarr-specs	3	impl/specs	3, 4, ???
ZEPs	1	"request review"	3, 4, ???

Clarifications:

• Slightly confusingly, Discussions for this repo (https://github.com/zarr-developers/community/discussions) redirects to https://github.com/orgs/zarr-developers/discussions.
• If Discussions are subsequently disabled for a repo, they disappear, so before doing that we would need to transfer them.

My personal feeling is the reducing the number of places that there can be Discussions is a Good Thing™️. A low-hanging fruit is to combine zarr-specs and ZEPs.

Beyond that, some options I can see are:

0. No big change; don't worry about this now.
1. Only org-level discussions
2. Discussions on zarr-python and org-level (includes specs)
3. Discussions on zarr-python and somewhere spec-y
4. Discussions on zarr-python, somewhere spec-y, and org-level (as the catch-all)
5. Use Issues everywhere.

Feel free to add more options and/or list your thoughts.

[joshmoore]

Pinging @zarr-developers/steering-council @zarr-developers/implementation-council @zarr-developers/python-core-devs @zarr-developers/community-manager

If no one is particularly worried about this, I'm inclined to move forward with collapsing discussions that we can (esp. ZEPs & zarr-specs), but if, e.g., the zarr-python teams want to keep separate discussions, then 👍.

[martindurant]

I'm not too worried. Discussions are like issues without a specific problem to be fixed - I use them about the same. If someone watches a repo, they will get notifications about both types equally, I think (is probably configurable).

[jhamman]

I favor keeping discussions around for zarr-python. I find that usage questions are much easier to manage there and like having the ability to transfer open-ended issues to discussions as a matter of house keeping.

If its possible to combine discussions around zeps and the spec, that seems like a reasonable thing to do.

[rabernat]

👍 to keeping zarr-python discussions standalone and consolidating others.

In zarr-developers/zeps#55 I made a specific proposal about how to streamline the ZEP / spec discussion process. Do we feel like that suggestion is actionable?

[joshmoore]

@MSanKeys963 is working on changes to ZEP0.

[jni]

My personal preference is to nuke all GH discussions. I hate the threading because it's impossible to know if multiple threads have been updated since you last looked. I'm generally ok with using closed issues for long-running discussions that don't need code fixing etc.

But, that's just my 2c. 😉

[d-v-b]

My personal preference is to nuke all GH discussions. I hate the threading because it's impossible to know if multiple threads have been updated since you last looked. I'm generally ok with using closed issues for long-running discussions that don't need code fixing etc.

But, that's just my 2c. 😉

@jni although I don't think we are putting github discussions under enough load to cause the problems you describe, suppose we were -- what would you recommend as an alternative? And (here's the hard part), how would you recommend we get everyone to use it?

[jni]

As I mentioned, good ol' issues, which makes it trivial for people to participate. (There's also Discourse but that has a much higher activation energy.)