Re: gnustep.org domain

[Richard Frith-Macdonald]

On 18 Jul 2013, at 09:19, Riccardo Mottola <riccardo.mottola@libero.it> wrote:

> Hi,
> 
> Lars Sonchocky-Helldorf wrote:
>> Hi Ivan,
>> 
>> see below …
>> 
>> Am 17.07.2013 um 23:10 schrieb Ivan Vučica:
>> 
>>> 
>>> 
>>> Once that works, to get that to work for our communication we'll just need 
>>> to set up some A, MX and PTR records on the domain to point to whatever 
>>> server we pick to host these services. I could do the initial hosting until 
>>> a permanent home is found for these services.
>>> 
>>> XMPP server can serve for both IM communication and to host a chatroom. 
>>> Some sort of realtime communication system that we can agree upon and which 
>>> does not depend on proprietary commercial providers is, I think, essential; 
>>> today I had an unpleasant experience that the messages sent from my XMPP 
>>> server to a Google Talk user went straight to /dev/null, courtesy of the 
>>> new "our Hangouts architecture is not based on XMPP" policy.
>> 
>> Well, there is #gnustep on irc.freenode.net <http://irc.freenode.net>, why 
>> splitting up the available channels further and having the burden to 
>> maintain this infrastructure too? IMHO this is a waste of effort.
>> https://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss-gnustep
> 
> +1
> 
> Well, general, let me "brake" your efforts a bit: you may think about chats, 
> you may think about forums on the website. Cool things for some people, but 
> they will die slowly if not used. Even worse, if somebody find something 
> "dead" it will enhance the impression of "death". If you don't have users, 
> real developers inside, it won't be useful.
> 
> IRC used to be active, but it is mostly dormant today. IRC is still a 
> favourite among "OSS hackers", since you can access it from a terminal to a 
> web page (through gateways).
> 
> The idea of forums came often up, but most developers agreed that mailing 
> lists are enough and good.
> 
> I suppose a similar fate for some sort of chat.
> 
> So before spending your time, adding something, make first sure that people 
> intend to use it!
> 
> For me, communication is divided clearly in:
> 1) email
> 2) IRC
> which I both can access through SeaMonkey and, in theory, with two (aging) 
> gnustep programs.
> For person-to-person communication there is the horribly proprietary Skype 
> which ends up being effective because it works and it is used, even if it 
> means that usually I have a second laptop just to use that crap ;)

I kind of agree ... when I'm at the computer I'm working on something (whether 
it's paid work or GNUstep work) and concentrating on what I'm doing.  That 
means, for me, that instant messaging and similar social media tools are 
horrible distractions which cause me to lose track of what I'm doing, so I 
always have them turned off.
Anything that can wait, I do on email. If it can't wait (or is just too 
complicated or unclear to do in email), then text chat is far too slow for me 
and I need speech... which in practice means phone or skype.

That being said, if there's a good free software voip system we could use for 
conferencing and voice chat, I'd like that.