#3226 Issue open: Deprecate mailing list, chat and discussions¶
Labels: cleanup, ReaR Project
schlomo opened issue at 2024-05-21 08:14:¶
From our website:
The mailing list http://lists.relax-and-recover.org/mailman/listinfo/rear-users is not working and the chat https://app.gitter.im/#/room/#rear_rear:gitter.im only has people asking for help but nobody answering.
Also the GH discussions https://github.com/rear/rear/discussions seem to be not very active.
I'd like to suggest to be honest with ourselves and towards our users and to deprecate all of that (mailing list, chat, discussions) in favor of using GH issues for public stuff. In any case we already use our personal emails for internal topics and that seems good enough.
My reasoning is that we should only promote those communication channels where we actually respond and care about, to reduce the disappointment of users when they reach out and nobody answers.
The trigger for doing this is that a user sent me an email asking if "ReaR is dead".
schlomo commented at 2024-05-21 08:20:¶
@rear/contributors please let me know what you think - silence means agreement.
BobMCT commented at 2024-05-27 17:19:¶
Hi Schlomo and others,
I'm the fellow who asked if ReaR was dead. I'm happy to hear that it is
not. A suggestion for a mechanism for help is to establish a ReaR group
on GoogleGroups. I maintain two different such groups for two
organization I participate in one, being a local Linux group and another
a programming group. Its easy to setup, use and participate in and
because it redirects content to registered users' email its easy to be
notified and even easier to respond.
Schlomo has mentioned that you get very little response from the USA. I
am not surprised because I've been in the IT field deeply since 1974 and
over the decades, especially in the past 10-15 years I've noticed a
general decline in user participation in many things here in the US.
Perhaps its the times or more likely its the changes in current
generational groups. Its sad but its also true. That being said I've
personally been trying to get ReaR fully function on my Ubuntu (actually
Linux mint) desktop although not yet successfully. My goal is to be able
to create a bootable OS recovery/configuration backup (ie: mkrescue) and
a separate data backup (ie: mkbackuponly) where the former gets run
periodically but the latter will run usually daily or multiple times per
week. Although I've scoured all the docs on ReaR that I could find I am
still not 100% successful. I follow all the guidelines/instructions and
some times it appears to complete successfully but other times not or
when I try to (test) recover it fails for one reason or another.
Also, although you fellows seem to do a splendid job of maintaining it
if I can be of any assistance testing anything I would certainly be
willing to contribute my time.
Hopefully something fruitful will result of this discussion. Enjoy your
week, all.
BobMCt
Marlborough CT USA FDCX.net
schlomo commented at 2024-05-27 17:25:¶
Hi @BobMCT thanks for speaking up here, really appreciating it.
we actually do have a mailing list, but it is broken/down/disappeared. In any case, even before that happened, it didn't see any action. A lot of people do reach out here and for your specific questions with your setup I'd kindly ask you to open a new issues here and fill in all the details - we'll do our best to help you out.
ReaR doesn't have a commercial arm doing aggressive marketing for it, so maybe that also contributes to us being "under the radar" of IT professionals.
[Export of Github issue for rear/rear.]