Everyone,
we’re in an interesting spot community-wise right now, which should be
clear to people who’ve been around here for a while, and definitely to
everyone at GRCon last year. While we’re still a smallish free software
project compared to KDE, Linux etc. we’ve gained a lot of traction in
the last years. Also, we cover an interesting spot where all the serious
competitors are expensive proprietary software.
But let’s cut to the chase: With a community that’s growing as fast as
it is, we’ll need to open up new avenues for communication, and weaken
our stance that the mailing list is the one-and-only place to ask
questions. For this reason, we would like to publicly announce that
we’ll be promoting Stack Overflow as an alternative from now on.
Right now, it’s just regular Stack Overflow with questions tagged
‘gnuradio’. And people have already been using this:
This was brought up at the “Community” working group at GRCon’14, and
Samantha (you may remember her from the panel) has volunteered to
initially make sure this gets off on a good start by monitoring SO
activities.
Now, some disclaimers: Most of us core developers probably won’t be
jumping onto this, you’ll find us mostly on this mailing list in the
future, as it is right now. However, with such a growth in the community
(at conferences all over the world, people who I’ve never heard of are
doing GNU Radio tutorials. That’s a good sign!), I’m hoping there’ll be
enough volunteers to keep this going.
Also, some things are simply better done on the mailing list than Stack
Overflow, such as lively discussions, announcements, bug dissections
etc. But we get enough one-off questions here which would be better
suited on Stack Overflow. The biggest advantage, if you ask me, is that
questions tagged ‘good’ on Stack Overflow are very easy to find, and
search engines such as DuckDuckGo show these answers directly at the top
of search results. Much, much easier than searching the ML archives.
OK, everyone. Let’s do this.
Martin
tl;dr: Stack Overflow can and should be used for questions as well as
the mailing list, and we need people to read and answer those Q’s.