Hey Robie, thanks for starting that discussion!
It's a tough sell to ask new Canonical employees to downgrade to IRC if they want to talk about Ubuntu development[5]. It's too easy to try and contact others about Ubuntu developers internally on Mattermost since many active Ubuntu developers are at Canonical. As a result, conversations that should be happening in public happen on private Mattermost all too often. People seem to have largely given up on pushing conversations to IRC.
+1 from me for moving for that reason. I've been trying for a long time to keep my Ubuntu conversations on the public channels but I mostly gave up on IRC at this point due to the lack of 'offline history'. I do find the Matrix user experience quite sub-optimal compared to Mattermost but it is still an improvement over IRC.
-1 from me on merging those, I think there is value in having a lower traffic channel where people can be focused on milestones (today it is not really making a difference becasue #ubuntu-devel is quiet but let's hope that moving to a more modern platform will bring back some activity). The queuebot is also quite noisy during freezes and I think that would have an negative impact on the #devel channel.# Collapsing #ubuntu-devel and #ubuntu-release into one
That said I think we would benefit of some guideline/clarity on the purpose of the channels. I do think that pings to the archive admin and SRU teams would be better placed on #devel which is often not the case today.
As we mention merging channels, I do wonder if we the #flavors split makes sense. Often the discussions there are about changes in the archive/Ubuntu Desktop/Server that are impacting flavors and it feels like using #ubuntu-devel would be better since then we would have a cross-groups shared space to resolve the problems. It would also help having a more active and engaging #ubuntu-devel channel.
Sébastien Bacher
