Neil McGovern (), who was the Debian project leader in 2015 and is now the head of the GNOME Foundation, about the start of testing a new infrastructure for discussions , which may replace some mailing lists in the future. The new discussion system is based on the Discourse platform used by projects such as GNOME, Mozilla, Ubuntu and Fedora.
It is noted that Discourse will allow you to get rid of the restrictions inherent in mailing lists, as well as make participation and access to discussions more convenient and familiar to newcomers. Of the functional limitations of mailing lists, which can be eliminated when using Discourse, the possibility of organizing full-fledged moderation is mentioned.
In its current form, discourse.debian.net will co-exist alongside the mailing lists, but it is possible that the new platform will replace some of the mailing lists in the future. In particular, the debian-user, debian-vote, and debian-project mailing lists are the top contenders for porting to Discourse, but the final decision will depend on whether Discourse takes root among the developers. For those who are used to mailing lists and are not into web discussions, a gateway is provided to allow communication on discourse.debian.net using email.
The Discourse platform provides a system of in-line discussions offered as a replacement for mailing lists, web forums, and chat rooms. It supports the division of topics based on tags, updating the list of messages in topics in real time and the ability to subscribe to topics of interest and send replies by email. The system is written in Ruby using the Ruby on Rails framework and the Ember.js library (data is stored in the PostgreSQL DBMS, the fast cache is stored in Redis). Code licensed under GPLv2.
Source: opennet.ru