On Sun, Jun 28, 2026 at 03:21:02PM -0500, Maxwell G wrote:
> Hi everyone,
Hi, thanks for starting this.
[...]
> We should move away from the Wiki and wikitext formatting. Wikitext is yet
> another text markup format that we use in Fedora that is not familiar to
> everyone, and it's apparently hard to parse programmatically. We could
> consider storing metadata about Changes (such as targeted release, change
> owners, status, FESCo issue number) in a structured way using Markdown
> front-matter that tools that work with Changes can easily consume.
Makes a lot of sense. IIUC, currently, these are the places a "change
proposal" goes:
(1) Wiki page - change is originally proposed
(2) Wiki change is copied to devel list
(3) Wiki change is copied to Discourse (this splits the discussion; and
adds broken formatting)
(4) FESCo ticket - voting
(5) Bugzilla - some other kind of tracking?
So much bloat. IMHO, all of this should be drastically culled and
collapsed into one tool, if possible.
> Changes should be written in markdown, or a markup format that can be easily
> converted to markdown or bbcode for display on Discourse, and also for plain
> text emails. If we use asciidoc, that would allow us to publish approved
> Changes to docs.fedoraproject.org which might be nice.
The main idea makes sense. As for format, whatever that is widely used
within the community (Markdown, AsciiDoc or whatever). And changes on
docs.fp.o sounds nice.
> We should store Changes as text files in a git repository. Change owners
> would propose Changes by filing a PR against the repository and then the
> Change would be announced after the Change Wrangler reviews and merges the
> Change text. We could have CI checks to validate Changes (e.g., to make sure
> that system-wide Changes have the correct optional fields) and various other
> opportunities for automation that we don't have with the wiki.
Storing changes in Git makes a ton of sense.
> Discourse should _not_ be the primary source of truth for Change Proposal
> texts. I've heard suggestions to use it for this, since it's one place and
> already supports markdown-formatted text and is currently used for
> discussion, but I don't believe it's a good place to store and work with
> Changes. There's not a good way to programmatically access Changes if they
> were stored in Discourse. Forum software is not meant for archiving
> anything. A repository of plain text files is better-suited for this
> purpose.
Agree, Discourse is not a good place as "the source of truth". It needs
to be Git-based.
> This part doesn't have to go along with a migration away from the Wiki that
> I am suggesting, but I wanted to float the idea here. I think we should
> consider whether to stop announcing Changes on Discourse. Cross-posting to
> Discourse was proposed as an experiment in fesco#2989, but there was never a
> decision made about whether to stop or continue with the experiment. I find
> the fractured discussions between devel@ and Discourse hard to follow. I
> think the Discourse setup makes it easier for discussions to "accelerate" or
> become toxic or repetitive. I don't think it's any better at handling large
> threads.
Whichever way we go, the sooner we fix this split discussion madness
between the list and forum, the better off the whole community is.
--
Kashyap Chamarthy / Red Hat / RISC-V and Fedora
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