Its actually pretty simple :

The maria-developers ml is used for development talks (eg. discussion about a patch, internal changes or development plans)
The maria-discuss ml is used about more common talks like questions about how Maria must be used/configured or about "political" issues
The maria-docs ml is used for documentation talks (eg. error on the KB, missing or incomplete documentation on a feature or a variable)
The IRC channel is used for real time chat with the team and Maria users and most of the users posting on the mailing lists are also on IRC, its usually the best way to ask for clarifications or to have a point of view from different persons on simple questions as it can help avoiding misinterpretations on how Maria works that could lead to invalid bug reports or simply to have someone to tell you that a problem you are having is most probably already known and that there is no need to spend time investigating and reporting it ; IRC wont replace a bug report and retrieving infos posted on it are not as simple/easy as retrieving a mail for one of the mailing lists archive, it wont be simple and clear for the team to have to read a chat backlog to extract the important informations on it while having to retrieve logs and informations from various pastebin URLs.

Jira is definitely not designed to chat or have discussions.
Informations posted on it must be as clear, precise and concise as possible by explaining simply the scope of the MDEV at first then putting details and examples so developers (and users that might have the same issue (or feature request)) can immediately find the MDEV you made without having to read the whole comments to be sure of what it is related to (or not) and it can avoid the creation of duplicates MDEV.
It means that a typical MDEV must have one specific topic and if you have a related issue/request that you are sure to be different even if it is similar in some aspects, you must create another one (you can create links between MDEV if required).
It also means that, on the other hand, if you have another angle about the same issue/request, you should use the existing MDEV to add the new informations and try to modify the MDEV Summary and Description texts instead of adding new informations only on comments as it can be time consuming to have to read the whole comments history and retrace the steps that have been made.

For example, by reading your MDEV-7125, many important informations are located on the comments (eg. putting at least the word "Optimizer" on the summary as its an optimizer issue, provide the info that it happens on 10.0.12 and 10.0.15 as well, that it is not storage engine related, put important server variables such as the optimize_switch, to be able to reproduce and understand the issue its way better to put the tables structure (that you can obfuscate for security reasons)) and as possible, try to simplify the example by trying to remove selected columns, concats, subqueries and joins that does not change which index is chosen ; it might be fastidious but it wont be less for the testers/devs and users that might hit the same issue will never be able to identify their issue to yours with an example that complex.

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About your second mail on how to use these channels : if you are talking about how to use IRC, you can use Hexchat which is an open source graphical client (if you prefer a command line client you can use irssi for example) then connect on irc.freenode.net "/server irc.freenode.net" then join the #maria channel "/join #maria" ; most of the users stays connected even when they are away from their keyboard or not checking IRC, it means that you should not expect every questions to be answered immediately, especially as users are scattered all around the world on different timezones.
Another possibility is to use a web applet to connect if you dont want to install a client but its less practical : https://webchat.freenode.net/

Le 02/12/2014 03:43, Roberto Spadim a écrit :

hi guys, at https://mariadb.com/kb/en/mariadb/community/community-contributing-to-the-mariadb-project/ , we have:

participate in e-mail discussions via our Launchpad lists (whichever list is most appropriate):

maria-developers

maria-discuss

maria-docs

but what is "whichever list is most appropriate", in other words, could we include some examples of what is expected in each mail list? for example, maria-docs about including, editing, removing docs from kb?! maria-developers talk about mdev development (i don't know how to use maria-developers, i some time sent wrong mail), etc... just one example

at the end of this docs, i found how to use mraia-developers (i never read it before...)

Where are the Developers?

Most of the core developers hang out on IRC in the #maria channel on

freenode.

Code, proposals, and feature requests are sent to (and discussed on) the maria-developers list.

should be interesting write a "community guide" or something like it? i many times use jira as 'chat' to ask question (sorry), today elena told me to don't chat there, but i don't know if i should use maria-developer or maria-discus or irc :/ any idea? i don