On 21/06/12 22:42, K. Peachey wrote:
I would prefer to see wikibugs stay in #mw to be honest, There is sometimes support stuff in there, as well as other important stuff. I'm sure people don't want to be flicking IRC channels every X, and wikibugs wasn't that high of traffic either...
Me too. -1 to moving them to another channel.
It's yet another channel to join, keep an eye on, add to autojoin. We start with a negative weight.
#mediawiki bots give useful, human-generated content. Compare with tsnag at #wikimedia-toolserver, that's a nagios bot that spits out warnings quite frequently on its own. There's little utility other than ignoring it.
What do #mediawiki bots report? - A person created a bug. We want that. - Someone commented a bug (sometimes more relevant than others, but also useful) - A new patchset - A new comment They are *useful* data. How many bugs advanced just because someone commented it and then a bunch of developers looked at it from the wikibugs log?
We also use them in our workflow. If we are talking about some bug, it's useful to view in the same channel that someone created that bug, or added extra information. If it's at a different tab, I may see it too late. Also things like a discussion "$USER, you should fix X", the commit appearing in the channel is an indirect answer. Same for when you refer to a comment, "Foo, that fixme message [on the previous line] is on a commit of yours". Go to another tab, and look in the scrollback for a notification at a similar time isn't agile. Someone adds a bug, you comment on the channel something about that one. Being on the same place improves the workflow.
Now, the problems: I agree commit bursts can be annoying, such as translatebot, but that has been fixed. Also, bug topic segregation will help by leaving only the relevant ones (eg. by excluding bugs for SMW, labs, WLM... which would go to their own channels).
"You assume that it's bot activity". I disagree. I consider #mediawiki as written by someone, and look at it as coming from a human, even when it has been a bot (heh, it has been *someone* at another place).
"It's hard to make a conversation." I don't find them being a problem. The messages are espaciated enough not to be problematic if you were talking anything else at the same time. There are also sometimes several intermixed conversations taking place at once. Which they are not a problem if they aren't too many. This is jut the same.
Why are they suddenly a problem? I guess part of the problem is that gerrit-wm is more verbose than svn commits (even when they spawned several lines). For instance, it outputs two messages for a merge (New review + Change merged), instead of just one. You have to parse them to realise they are just the same action. That's something that ought be fixed (at gerrit side), but taking the bots out of the channel isn't a solution. *That* would lead to them being ignored. (btw, as a last resort option, you can /ignore the bots)