Hi -project,

Many years ago I created an IRC bot for Debian that would live on its own channel and simply notify on new uploads, bugs and similar changes in that distribution:

https://chris-lamb.co.uk/projects/debian-devel-changes-bot

… it is now rather popular and, indeed, many people have noted to me in the interim years not only how motivating it was to be exposed to others' work like that without having to explicitly or actively look for it but it informs & keeps them up-to-date on the project in a wider, less-technical, sense.

I found it also a valuable learning tool — if I don't understand a bug report that scrolls past I sometimes click it and invariably end up learning something I didn't previously know.

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In this light, I created the following ticket early last year to get this rolling for PureOS:

https://tracker.pureos.net/T375

… however, movement on this appears to have stalled or otherwise is lower on others' priority lists than I believe it should be.

The basic idea would be to have a separate "dev/pureos/changes" (or similarly named) Matrix room that would have this info spammed into it. Discussions would remain on dev/pureos or, of course, on issue tracker, etc.

The bug itself unfortunately is a little ambiguous about what we would like to include in the notifications (tracker bugs vs uploads vs Git commits...), but I firmly and adamently believe that getting *anything* at the moment would be great start so I wasn't being overly specific by design. (The task is also being tracked in parallel on the sysadmin tasks tracker too, adding somewhat to the confusion.)

Note that this would also help relieve some developers of feeling like they are the only ones who know about certain areas, preventing further potential "siloing" of knowledge.

Just to underline, whilst it might appear to be a "wishlist" feature, I believe it will provide some always-needeed social cohesion and connection within the PureOS development team! As geeks we often criminally underrated such things.. we are humans too!

Any thoughts? In particular, can we get some strong +1's from you all (especially Jeremiah) to take back to the ticket and hopefully parley that into getting this reprioritised?

Best wishes,