[pdal] PDAL Zulip at https://pdal.zulipchat.com

[Greg Troxel]

Howard Butler via pdal <pdal at lists.osgeo.org> writes:

>> What’s wrong with just having discussions on this mailing list? It’s
>> not like this list is extremely high volume and it is hard to keep
>> track of.
>
> Nothing and the mailing list is the primary communication medium, but
> I know that not everyone is comfortable posting on mailing lists, and
> I was looking to provide an alternative venue for asynchronous chat.

By way of introduction, I'm not really using pdal yet (I hope to deal
with USGS LIDAR data for micromapping), but hope to in the future.  I
maintain the gdal, proj, geos, postgis, qgis and a few others in pkgsrc.

My $0.02 from being on many Free Software projects:

  I get it why some people like chat, but the discipline of actually
  composing mail tends to keep the S/N ratio higher.  I find that I
  cannot stand to follow most chats.

  I think Free Software projects should only use Free tools, and not
  expect people to enter into agreements with non-charitable third
  parties to participate.  (I know this argues against github.)  These
  days, that tends to lead to matrix.   (Because IRC seems too hard for
  the people that don't like mailinglists.)

osgeo already has a matrix homeserver, and it seems that one could have
#pdal:osgeo.org and avoid the entire third party system.  Yes, people
need a matrix account on some system, but not any particular system, and
they can self-host if they want.