[development] #drupal / #drupal-dev split considered harmful

[Gabor Hojtsy]

Khalid Baheyeldin wrote:
>     As I understood it was:
> 
>     #drupal - development focused
>     #drupal-support - support focused - for newbies
> 
> 
> The problem is that #drupal  is the first place newbies will think
> of to get support. Once they are there, they are greeted with the
> "support?" reply telling them to go to #drupal-support.
> 
> This can be offputting and make people feel unwelcome. They
> ask the first question and get a reply that amounts to : "we don't
> serve your type here, buzz off!" (plagiarised from Esmerel)
> 
> So, I don't see why charters can change, with development
> in #drupal-dev (and only development), then #drupal become
> community focused, has support, infra discussions, and everything
> else that is not development.

I think this is very reasonable (although I am not one of the heavy 
IRC-heads, I am rarely seen on IRC).

I would like to point out that the PHP development channel used to be 
called "php-dev", and lots of people thought that is the support channel 
and asked, well, PHP development questions (as-in development *with* 
PHP, not development *of* PHP). So the guys simply renamed the list 
"internals", so it clearly shows off that it is for internal stuff. This 
kind of renaming in the Drupal case (to internals) would be quite 
unwelcoming, masking the developer community as being closed. But I 
think repurposing #drupal to stand for support stuff and using 
#drupal-dev for development stuff makes a lot of sense.

Gabor