Re: Gitter room for Hydra

I think that gitter is super important when developing something open source that has an active community.
I also agree with Markus and Ruben that the mailing list is already covering most discussion topics, but IRC was there for anyone wanted to ask something on the fly, and maybe something stupid.

This is done now by gitter (with a lot more functionality).
So, I will agree with Asbjørn that gitter is indeed a nice alternative to IRC and maybe to some of the emails.
If it is not active, we can always switch it off.

Michael.


On Sep 30, 2015, at 1:40 PM, Asbjørn Ulsberg <asbjorn@ulsberg.no<mailto:asbjorn@ulsberg.no>> wrote:

2015-09-30 9:29 GMT+02:00 Ruben Verborgh <ruben.verborgh@ugent.be<mailto:ruben.verborgh@ugent.be>>:
Personally, I haven't understood the attractiveness of gitter (it's probably just me)
because it requires me to keep a browser tab open all the time.
With IRC / other protocols, I can choose my client.

While I agree an open protocol like IRC give you more choice in clients, there's still protocol limits with IRC that are hard to overcome by just choosing a good client. Often, such clients cost money (like IRCCloud) and are also web based. One problem with IRC is history, for instance.

Having the channel reset on every netsplit or server reboot and having to be logged in to the channel to accumulate the history, is a major deficiency that is very hard to solve. Also, not having any support for markup, makes communication very rudimentary, unengaging and more time-consuming than rich hypermedia-supporting interfaces like Slack and Gitter.

Since Hydra already exists on Gitter, the integration provided with automatic linking and popup views of issues and such make communication about everything that exists on GitHub much, much easier. No need to click anything and change application and context to see what something is; a simple glance within the chat is all that is required. Much more efficient and user friendly than what is remotely possible in the most advanced IRC clients.

And back to the choice of clients, Gitter has native clients for all major platforms:

https://gitter.im/apps


--
Asbjørn Ulsberg           -=|=-        asbjorn@ulsberg.no<mailto:asbjorn@ulsberg.no>
«He's a loathsome offensive brute, yet I can't look away»