Slack-like chat (also for GSOC)

[Rainer Müller]

On 12.05.19 21:49, Mojca Miklavec wrote:
> 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 think Slack workspaces are also always invite only, but please correct
me if I am wrong (maybe only for paid plans?). Assuming we might want to
replace IRC one day as the official development and support chat, that
would not work well.

I think it is important that this would be open for anyone interested to
join, with private group chats as an optional feature.

>> 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 :).

I recently tried the Matrix IRC Bridge to FreeNode IRC. By using riot.im
it actually works quite well and was easy to set up. It also solves the
"always-on" problem of IRC as it acts like a bouncer.

>>> 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.

For the self-hosted options, Rocket Chat would be an option. However,
when we used it at work, after a while I started to miss some kind of
threading for longer conversations. Although we also usually do not have
long conversations or that much activity on IRC, so maybe this is not
that important here.

Rainer