[osg-users] [ A Stack Overflow for OSG? ]

[Robert Osfield]

Hi Michael,

On 20 February 2017 at 08:34, michael kapelko <kornerr at gmail.com> wrote:
> I would says from my personal experience that stackoverflow is a great place
> to find answers to common questions and, what's more important, to see most
> upvoted answers.
> Mailing list/forum doesn't have that.

I agree that there are advantages for certain types of FAQ style issues.

However, it's completely inappropriate for more involved topics, very
often we get a thread started on the mailing list/forum that requires
an iterative approach where those with more experience have to request
more information, more tests, and steadily explore the issues that
users are seeing.

Then there are design/implementation testing topics, again a
discussion forum/mailing list is what is required.

I am sure I can come up with other.type of discussion that we
regularly have in the community that are in-appropriate for somethiing
like StackOverflow.


> I would also say that moving to Stackoverflow from Mailing list/Forum is
> like moving from self-hosted SVN to Github: the idea is the same, but
> implementation is more convenient (e.g., no need to attach complete files
> where you only need a tiny pull request).

We can do all our version control work on Github,  We absolutely can't
do all our comminication work on StackOverflow.  It's not a case of
replacing a self managed Subversion repository with a centrally
managed service like Github.

If we were to embrace StackOverflow we would still need to existing
forum/mailing list, you are ADDING an extra avenue of work not
replacing one.  The resource that is most precious for us is not user
time, but the time of people like myself, the ones doing the support.
Splitting support duties over multiple venues is a dreadful way to go,
speading yourself too thinly is a guarentee of burnout and failure.

So SVN -> Github, it's absolutely not the same thing as forum/mailing
list -> Stackoverflow.

Robert.