Creating a Community Hub for EXWM

[adg-adg]

I use EXWM daily and have come to rely greatly on it. I have found it an issue that there isn't really a community dedicated to EXWM anywhere on the internet that one could turn to in order to find information and support.

I realize that there is a wiki on this github page, but it doesn't answer many potential questions and doesn't have that many detailed examples for people to adopt to their needs.

I'm wondering if it would benefit the project and the community that's growing around it, to create somekind of a semi-official community space where more experienced users could provide help to the newcomers and in general foster a community around this great project. Emacs itself has a good community at r/emacs & #emacs on freenode. Spacemacs has a gitter instance where a lot of good discussion takes place and an appropiate r/spacemacs. A lot of these solutions are proprietary (reddit/gitter) and it would be good to help boost the knowledge and exposure of the libre philosophy through the use of an appropriate forward-looking, libre platform.

I propose that we start an official EXWM community room on the https://matrix.org platform since I believe it fits all of the requirements and is forward looking. I'll spare the intoduction here since the official website goes properly in-depth, I suggest to anyone not familiar with it to give it a look.

There is an established client for it, although it isn't required for use since matrix is a protocol therefore may be used through any appropriate client, located at riot.im that it able to work on every single major software ecosystem (GNU/Linux, Android, macOS, iOS, Windows and as a web interface). There is also an emacs package in the works, but it seems like it isn't completely ready as of yet ( https://github.com/jgkamat/matrix-client-el ).

What are people's thoughts on this?

[zevlg]

At https://github.com/zevlg/telega.el we use telegram group as a room. IRC is for oldfags, matrix does not have clients on mobile and not widespreaded, discord is slow

[ch11ng]

The platform we are currently working on is proprietary. I'm fine with any choice as long as it is easy to reach and does not abuse users' privacy. Right now I'm not able to submit my work to GNU Savannah and that's a counterexample of an ideal platform even though it's libre. What I'm concerned more with is what content should be provided which I believe most should be covered by the wiki.

[AndreaOrru]

@zevlg “IRC is is for oldfags”? Never thought I’d read this sentence here, in this repo, of all places.

All the contrary, I think a IRC channel with associated searchable logs would be great. No one would ever install other obscure solutions to talk about EXWM.

A Telegram extension is hardly a valid counterexample, for obvious reasons. ;)

[zevlg]

@AndreaOrru not to offend anybody, but be realistic, IRC is dead

[AndreaOrru]

It really isn’t - tons of interesting discussions and help requests for open source projects still happen on Freenode all the time. It’s an invaluable resource and it does the job just fine. IRC is not going anywhere and it’s certainly not being superseded by Telegram - if anything a case could be made for Slack.

[adg-adg]

@AndreaOrru riot.im is not an obscure solution and is one that will only continue to gain in adoption going forward, look into it if you're not convinced. Slack is proprietary and should be out of consideration, especially considering the fact that riot.im serves a great replacement for it and more. IRC is great and since riot.im uses the matrix protocol, all of IRC is accessible through matrix/riot.

@zevlg telegram has numerous problems, I don't even consider it as an option. Some links after quick googling (could be outdated, but many more issues are documented elsewhere): https://yalantis.com/blog/whats-wrong-telegram-open-api/ https://gizmodo.com/why-you-should-stop-using-telegram-right-now-1782557415

@ch11ng GitHub is proprietary and is not ideal. Gitlab provides a better alternative that's still modern, I think there should be at least a mirror there. What are your specific problems with putting the project on GNU Savannah?

[ch11ng]

What are your specific problems with putting the project on GNU Savannah?

Our official repo is actually there. It just seems lack of maintenance sometimes. And it was apparently out of service last time.

[agzam]

What about Gitter? I know it totally sucks but somehow Spacemacs and Magit have quite number of active users there.

[ieure]

Probably best to just create something and throw it out there. Looks like there's a few folks in #exwm on Freenode.

[emacksnotes]

@ch11ng GitHub is proprietary and is not ideal. Gitlab provides a better alternative that's still modern, I think there should be at least a mirror there. What are your specific problems with putting the project on GNU Savannah?

Gitlab allows one to attach videos to the issue tracker (while Github doesn't).

Many issues that I see on the exwm issue tracker has a visual aspect to it. So, having a screen recording / video of the problem in action, is not merely useful, but is immensely necessary.

If only Github allowed posting of videos, I wouldn't have to carry out elaborate steps of upload the video (to say, Google Drive), make the video public, copy-paste the url in to issue tracker etc.

I am not sure if the capability of attaching videos is enough of a deal breaker for exwm to move to gitlab. Even if the project is not moving to gitlab enbloc--I understand why migration is more of a headache than a value proposition--it would be useful to have an official clone in Gitlab, and when an issue necessitates an accompanying video, encourage the user to open a bug / post the video in Gitlab, and open a /proxy/ bug report here.

I understand that Savannah has it's own repo that runs on Gitlab. So, the capability to upload videos to an issue, applies equally well to Savannah instances.

[emacksnotes]

... and when an issue necessitates an accompanying video, encourage the user to open a bug / post the video in Gitlab, and open a /proxy/ bug report here.

For the sake of record, I just did this. See https://gitlab.com/emacksnotes/exwm-issues/issues/1