Jenkins development category

There currently is no category where users would post Jenkins development topics. I think it would be useful to cover not just major new developments (in “showing off”) and topics of a very wide interest (in “announcements”), but also questions and topics that do not fit these categories.

I see Discussion about Categories listed “Plugin Development” under “Contributing”, but that a) ignores core and tooling development and b) not all Jenkins development is contributions to the project, there are plenty of private plugins. I expect that most topics in this category would look very different from the average “Contributing” topic (based on what’s currently there), making the category not actually useful.

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Thanks for your feedback.

I think in general with exception of the sigs, we were erring on the side of waiting to see what kind of content shows up to decide if we need more categories. This was based on the guides that discourse itself publishes about having too many categories at first. Do you have a specific post your unable to post? or is it a hypothetical problem?

For now can you post under Contributing, and we can move things around as needed?

I have no specific topic in mind, and I also don’t feel comfortable posting without a suitable category. That feels like it’s “off topic” to me.

It seems that in particular existing mailing lists would translate well into categories (similar to SIGs), and this is half of jenkinsci-dev (the other half being governance topics).

If the idea is that development topics should continue in the dev list, that’s fine with me too, I just hadn’t seen that explicitly stated like that.

I think once we better figure out how to use categories and tags, I would be in favor of moving discussion from the dev mailing list to discourse. I think it globally improves visibility on the various discussion and it’s easier to jump from one topic to another.

We don’t yet have a category for development because we didn’t reach a consensus yet which I think now time is come.

I am currently hesitating on different approaches:

  1. Three subcategories of “contributing”, “core”, “plugins”, “tooling” and inside each of time we would use tags to identify specific areas of discussion
  2. One subcategory of “contributing” named “code” and we would use tags to identify specific core,plugin discussion
  3. New category named “development”

I would avoid having too many categories because it makes it harder to know where to post a new topic and where to participate.

  • Three new subcategories “core”, “plugins”,“tooling” under “Contributing”
  • One subcategory “code” under “Contributing”
  • A new category “development” next to “Contributing”
  • Other
0 voters

I like the idea of “Code” under “Contributing” because it matches with Participate and Contribute that includes a “Code” topic.

I am fine with “Code” though I would assume it will be complicated in the future. We have 4 main types of code:

  • Contributing to the Jenkins backend functionality (Java, Maven dev tools and so on)
  • Contributing to Jenkins frontend (Javascript, some Jelly/Stapler, UX/UI, Accessibility)
  • Writing Shared Jenkins Pipeline Libraries, including the public and reusable ones (e.g. one by @shadycuz or MPL)
  • Writing configuration management tools for Jenkins (e.g. Helm, Operators or native installers)

All of that qualifies as code, not to speak about Documentation-as-Code. We can always introduce the third-level categories, bit I would rather vote for a separate “Jenkins Development” category with sub-categories as listed above. No real need to split the core and plugins IMHO

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I explain further up that can be a problem causing confusion, not all Jenkins development is contributions to the project. Conversely, not all code contributions to the Jenkins project are Jenkins development questions. I don’t see questions about update-center2 and other parts of infra going there.

Categories can easily be move afterward, it’s just that it’s just difficult to use the third level.
I voted for a subcategory under contributing but considering that we have an ex aequo, I am changing my vote to a new category.

I think it is a good idea to have a category “Code” or “Development”. Either as a separate top-level category or a sub-category below contributing (both are ok for me). I would not make sub-categories below “Code”, the traffic in our current dev list is so low, another sub-division seems to be not required yet.

I created a subcategory “code” under contributing
code - Jenkins

At the moment we don’t have restrictions on tags, we can still move the category to the top level if we realize that we want more subcategories but in the current state I don’t think we should go that far

This category is about discussing everything related to code floating around the Jenkins project

Cool, so this is where I ask basic Ruby questions when working on jenkins-infra/jenkins.io?

Why would I ever want to do that? How is that useful?

Why not? Even though I wouldn’t think of the Jenkins discourse instance to ask basic ruby questions.
Personnally, I would prefer asking questions related to the infrastructure project in the infrastructure category. Maybe I should improve description to suggest others place before asking in the code category

The point I’m trying to make is that it is useful for us to define what should be discussed here. Appropriate categories are an important part of that. A category as general as “code” doesn’t exactly help, and the current structure (below “contributing”) and description has the problem I mentioned further up – it disincentivizes asking appropriate questions because the results will not directly be contributed to the Jenkins project, while incentivizing questions that have no reason to be on this site.

What about having specific tags with a clear description such as

  • core: Discussion about Jenkins core
  • plugin: General question about plugin development such as “git-plugin”
  • component: Question about Jenkins component development such as “remoting”
  • tooling: Question about Jenkins tooling development

I would be in favor of not adding more categories unless we realise that we have too much noise in a specific one

Nobody is asking for more categories.

If you prefer it this way, sure. Your Discourse.

FTR the category you created isn’t even close to what I was asking for and does not serve the purposes I wanted it for.

Nobody is asking for more categories.

Sorry when I said categories that also I meant sub-categories.
I am proposing to use tags instead of (sub)-categories for organizing a discussion that’s it.
Now I am totally fine to grant you permission to implement what you have in mind, if it helps you to create new topic.

If you prefer it this way, sure. Your Discourse.

There is no such thing as my discourse, I am just trying to explain my view and help to build a sustainable forum.