| > No, but having discussions somewhere completely unlinked to your open source repository https://github.com/swaywm/sway#sway > Join the IRC channel (#sway on irc.freenode.net). This is a clickable link. >without a searchable archive and no way to link to discussions does This misrepresents how IRC is supposed to work. You're not supposed to catch up on what you missed. You're supposed to have the conversation there. It's like chatting at the watercooler, not writing into stone. If you're "searching" the logs as part of your normal IRC routine, you're using IRC incorrectly. >> so you're not entitled to support, features, or yes, even explanations of why decisions were made >I was initially going to respond by saying "then you shouldn't ask for contributions". You're not entitled to it, but you might receive it anyway. And the only one of these which relates directly to contributions is explanations - withholding features and support, in fact, leads to more contributions. I have written about this on my blog on several occasions if you want to learn more about this approach. |
I fully agree, nobody wants to search IRC logs for technical information about a project.
If the only documentation about a technical decision in an open source project is an IRC discussion, then that project is just doing open source wrong. Those logs are at best hard to search for, and more often than not, non-existent.
When we have "online" meetings (IRC / Discord / Zulip / Matrix / Zoom / ...) to discuss technical issues in our open source projects, we always publish a full summary of the meetings so that everyone who wasn't there can read them and follow the rationale, or raise issues with it.