Slack-like chat (also for GSOC)

[Mojca Miklavec]

On Sun, 12 May 2019 at 21:15, Clemens Lang wrote:
> On Thu, May 09, 2019 at 11:38:16PM +0200, Mojca Miklavec wrote:
> > I know that our official channels only include mailing lists, IRC and
> > PR/ticket discussion so far, but I'm curious about your stand with
> > respect to setting up a service like Zulip Chat / Rocket Chat / ...
> > for aiding the GSOC communication when higher frequency of potentially
> > simple questions would be needed. I know IRC could fulfill such a
> > task, but it doesn't work too well for me. (I'm offline when at work,
> > cannot really use phone efficiently for communication etc..)
>
> I don't have particularly strong feelings about any of these solutions
> with a slight tendency towards an open source solution.

I would prefer OpenSource as well.

My experience from work was that we started with Slack (which btw.
works very nice) and initially everyone said that we would use it just
as real-time chat and that nobody would ever need the archives. That
is: until someone needed them. At that point the solution was
considered way to expensive to be used long-term and we switched to
something else.

> I do see the
> benefits compared to IRC also from experience at work. If that's
> something we as a community agree on, I wouldn't mind switching my IRC
> presence.

We don't need to all agree at once. I don't see anything wrong with
giving it some testing first and decide what's best (no need to ask
everyone to turn IRC off :).

> > Would it be realistic to install such a service on breaburn if needed?
> > (Or is it too complex / too much work?)
>
> I'd prefer a SaaS offering here. Self-hosting just increases the
> maintenance burden and I don't think we need the configurability.

One can in principle integrate many things (commit messages, buildbot
reports, pull request notifications, irc gateway, ...)

I looked at Zulip chat which was used for GSOC meeting. That one would
also only retain the last few thousand messages unless we payed an
amount that we could not afford as a project.
Mattermost probably doesn't offer any free SaaS option?
Discord would probably work as a free service, but I'm not too keen about it.

I wouldn't mind cloud solutions, but it probably boils down to either
paying, or being limited by X, or hosting it yourself.

Mojca