Folks keep wanting to talk about the change in breaking changes but its not allowed. we should either remove commenting (making it a news-like board) and forcing folks to make a thread to talk about it like the matterbin thread or allow discussion on the topic to keep peoples thoughts on a change all in one place. I dont mind which path we take but having it unlocked but your not meant to talk there is not the way to go imo.
Hereās what both the purpose and idea behind the Breaking Changes section are for:
Breaking Changes is not a place to discuss game development proposals or ideas. It is not a place to have a back-and-forth on whether a change was liked or not. It is simply a place meant to inform people of codebase changes that people need to be made aware of.
Letās say, for example, we remove dwarves. Poof, gone. This is the forum for the upstream repository used by many other servers. Therefore, deleting dwarves is likely to have a high impact on downstream codebases. It is a breaking change, and therefore a topic is posted here about it.
Discussion about āremoving dwarvesā should have been done prior to the breaking changes post. It should have happened on github or in whatever maintainer discussion was potentially created for this change.
But letās say, for instance, Iām a downstream maintainer and I see the āRemoved Dwarvesā post in Breaking Changes. The goal and purpose of the post is to inform me what this change does and how to change things in a broad manner to make sure removing dwarves doesnāt break my downstream forkās code entirely.
But maybe my fork has some interesting dwarf integrations and itās a bit more tightly-coupled. I could ask in that Breaking Changes post about what my technical issues are in regard to the change so that I can be sure that I can either work around the change to keep dwarves in, or remove them entirely.
Saying āAhh, Iām not so sure removing dwarves is the right call here.ā or āItās good we did this, but I figured weād want a height slider first?ā should have happened in its pull request. By the time we hit Breaking Changes, itās too late.
Removing the ability to discuss this isnāt helpful for downstream maintainers that may have technical or integration-related questions about a change.
Opening it up to thoughts and opinions betrays the entire purpose of the posting; hemming and hawing over a change obscures the technical, integration-focused discussion that the post was designed for.
2 Likes
Hmm.. maybe it should be only maintainers can reply? I noticed a few times users using it as you said as a place of discussion rather than its intended purpose to get assistance on downstreamed effected.
Sometimes users of the forums dont know a change is happening until it appears on breaking but steps are being put in place for that such as the new PR discussions board.
for example today I discovered the map removal and had no chance to discuss it as the first time I heard about it was on the breaking changes thread as it was discussed on discord not forums.
I also didnāt know that was what the purpose of leaving it unlocked was so.. consider my main point moot.
What if a dev from another fork needs to talk about it for any reason, like asking for suggested ways to update their repo?
Sometimes it may be obvious, others there may be an intended alternative ready for use that is not immediately obvious.
Weād like to have the breaking changes posts be open just in case any fork contrib wants help, guidance, or has questions on any breaking changes post. Itās not meant to be a place to voice your opinion on the changes.
Locking it behind whitelisted access wouldnāt be productive as the people who want to talk on there are commonly not a contrib for the upstream repo and donāt want to wait to be whitelisted.
Hmm.. I suppose then there isnāt a good way to control this right nowā¦
I cant think of another solution soā¦ unless someone else can think of a way that users can be warned this isnāt a discussion board other than saying it.. then itāll be as itāll be.
I would hope it would be obvious that itās about technical thingsā¦ when all the posts contain a ton of technical jargon and the category description literally says as much.
I think some folks are treating it like āpatch notesā where its like weāre making this change and reacting to it.
Yeah I really donāt know what to say other than that those people should learn how to use their eyeballs.