Deactivate Github Discussions

[alexdesiqueira]

@scikit-image/core, I'll continue here the discussion we started on Zulip.
IMHO, we're having a hard time trying to keep up with "Issues" and "Discussions," and some of the good discussions we are having on the issues (:joy:) are being lost on the move between both.
I personally don't see any points in favor of maintaining "Discussions" now. I think keeping both is a little bit clunky; I also feel that converting things from "Issues" to "Discussions" is being detrimental to us.
Therefore, I'd suggest for us to disable "Discussions" for the time being. Any (strong) opinions?
Thanks!

Related to #5588.

[rfezzani]

I am not used to connecte to Zulip, so I missed this discussion, sorry.

I am not really in favour of this, exactly for the same reasons that pushed us to activate GH Discussions...

[rfezzani]

It feels like a huge amount of work thrown in the trash 😕

[alexdesiqueira]

(from Zulip)
Sorry @rfezzani 🙁 I was one of the devs in favor when we started the discussion, but my view at that point was:

I think it would be nice to have everything centralized somewhere, actually.

I'm afraid we did the opposite; we're spreading ourselves everywhere, and I'm personally having a hard time trying to keep up with Zulip, image.sc forum, scientific-python forum, GH/GL Issues, PRs, Discussions, ... I've dropped forums already, and spent a couple of months without coming here (on Zulip), but I feel that we're losing some important things slicing stuff even more. My two BRL cents, though 🙂

[stefanv]

At minimum, we need to find a way to move back discussions to issues that should not have converted.

Currently, I cannot see a clear directive for what content should go to discussions. We have (a) issues for things related to code (b) the image.sc forum for user questions (c) the scientific-python forum for developer discussions and (d) zulip for realtime chat. I don't see how Discussions fit in here, or how it makes our lives easier.

[hmaarrfk]

It would be nice to have things more centralized.

[rfezzani]

@hmaarrfk

It would be nice to have things more centralized.

Sorry I didn't understood your opinion on this issue, do you consider that using GH Discussion help centralizing things since every thing is in the same service (Github) or do you think that it decentralizes things, as it is maybe redundant with image.sc, zulip and the scientific-python forum?

@stefanv

At minimum, we need to find a way to move back discussions to issues that should not have converted.

@grlee77 found the way to do that (please see https://github.com/scikit-image/scikit-image/discussions/5950#discussioncomment-1506648)

Currently, I cannot see a clear directive for what content should go to discussions.

Please see #5950, these directives can of course be refined/modified, discussion is open 🙂 ...

We have (a) issues for things related to code (b) the image.sc forum for user questions (c) the scientific-python forum for developer discussions and (d) zulip for realtime chat. I don't see how Discussions fit in here, or how it makes our lives easier.

Converting non issues to Discussion helps bug triage, nothing more...

@jni from zulip

imho issues that will never require code or documentation updates should just be closed and used as discussion anyway. "feel free to keep the discussion going" etc. To me, increasing the number of pigeonholes doesn't solve the pigeonholing problem...

I feel that converting an open non issue to a discussion is more kind than simply closing it. I don't see Discussion as a pigeonhole but simply a gentle alternative to the issue trash box.

[hmaarrfk]

I think there are a few things that are important:

1. Realtime interaction -- zulip or gitter (we chose zulip)
2. Issues -- Real problems with the code that need to be addressed. -- Github issues
3. Usage questions -- image.sc, scientific-python, stackoverflow, github discussions

In terms of getting help with usage, I think it is rather decentralized, and isn't clear where people should ask Usage questions.

The good thing about Github is that Issues can be triaged into Discussions without asking the user to create a new post.

Personally, I don't think we should shut down the other locations, just maybe let the core devs chose where they want to spend their time. Centralization is "nice" but Github Discussions were a late addition.

I think in a few years, things will resolve themselves out. Personally, I think Github is kinda nice. But the backend is closed source, so that is somewhat not desirable. That said, I don't know how to "move issues" to image.sc and back fluidly.

[rfezzani]

@jni from zulip

One thing that was also not clear at that point @rfezzani was that converting to discussion closes the issue and creates a new discussion issue, further fragmenting even existing discussions. I'd instead envisioned that changing back and forth between issues and discussions would be seamless and preserve the issue number. It's honestly a mess now.

Converting an issue to discussion closes it and creates a new discussion, I don't see any mess here. An issue converted back from a discussion is simply reopen with it's original number (please see #2522 for example)

As we discussed already, many of the converted issues should be converted back, but it's not an easy job.

That's a triage task, not funny, but not so hard. I probably been too fast in my first attempt for triage, so please give me directives to find the discussions that should be converted back, I would be happy to do it.

[rfezzani]

Thank you @hmaarrfk for these clarifications.

[grlee77]

Please also see #6171. Adding a SUPPORT.md file like this may also help redirect some users who start to open an issue to image.sc or other appropriate resources.

[grlee77]

The overall consensus in the last community meeting was to disable Discussions again (sorry @rfezzani, I know you spent a lot of time moving things over there and this must be frustrating). @alexdesiqueira has volunteered to help with closing discussions and reopening the corresponding issue.

I am not sure what is the most efficient way to cross reference which issue to reopen after closing the corresponding discussion, but I did run a script to query issues closed by Riadh in a narrow date range around the time we first started opening discussions. I have posted it under the details tag below, hoping it may be quicker to search this list than run searches in the issues box for each one. It will not be an exact 1-1 mapping as some issues may have been closed for reasons other than moving to discussions and issue moved to discussions more recently will not be in the list below. Perhaps there is a way to fully automate things with a script, but that would take some reading of the GitHub API docs to determine if there is a way to query discussions and determine if they were converted from an existing issue.

List of issues that may have been converted to Discussions

DONE!

[stefanv]

@alexdesiqueira is away for a bit, so if someone is interested in moving this along quickly, feel free to jump in.

[stefanv]

@rfezzani I see you've applied the discussion tag; I like that as a way of disambiguating / filtering issues!

[alexdesiqueira]

@alexdesiqueira has volunteered to help with closing discussions and reopening the corresponding issue.

Thank you for organizing this list, @grlee77! Abusing your kindness a lil bit, could I ask you to start the process until I come back? 🙂
Thanks again!

[grlee77]

Update the details in #6167 (comment) to fix the issue links and remove ones I moved back to issues so far

[grlee77]

closing now that everything was moved back to issues and the Discussions tab has been disabled again

[hmaarrfk]

@grlee77 you have done thankless work! I hope we can avoid this kind of churn in the future! Time for me to subscribe again!

[stefanv]

Thank you all, and apologies for not giving better earlier feedback which could have avoided frustration along the way.

[alexdesiqueira]

Thank you very much, @grlee77! I owe you a couple of beers!