Building the Buck2 community

[lunagl]

Hey,

so Buck2 is a great build system and arguably the best solution for many use cases right now, at least in theory. Still, it is mostly used within Meta and a few select other companies, and hasn't found huge adoption in the wider open source community.

I believe a big reason for this is the lack of a community that allows participation. Others have already criticized the "internal-first" workflow, where Meta's internal repository, CI, code review, etc is the source of truth and changes are only mirrored to external afterwards. But I am not expecting any fundamental changes to that system, as doing so would obviously be an enormous effort. Instead, I think there are lower-hanging fruit that could seriously improve the experience of working with and on Buck2.

Most importantly, I would like to suggest starting proper community channels (e.g., a chatroom, maybe a zulip instance, etc), and investing more into community interaction. Right now one is pretty much on their own when trying to adopt Buck2 in any capacity. Together with the somewhat complex nature of Buck2, plus the severely limited docs, this makes actually using it a serious challenge. The prelude in particular is not really documented, and maintainer contacts are only given for some of the languages (https://buck2.build/docs/about/language_support/).

An open source project can only reach its full potential when it is also backed by a strong community.

Apologies for the rather long text, I hope it's not too rambly. By the way, thank you to everybody involved in the project; I really appreciate your work!

[riggspc]

hi @lunagl - thank you for kicking off this thread, and apologies it took a little while for you to get a response.

I agree that there's some low hanging fruit. Specifically, there's already a fan-created Buck2 Discord server that I'd be happy to invite you to. Reach out to me on Discord (same username) and I'll get you an invite.

For some of the more complex pieces (e.g. improving external CI), we're aware of the pain points and are hoping to make some incremental steps to improving things.

[lunagl]

Thanks for the reply, appreciate it!

I agree that there's some low hanging fruit. Specifically, there's already a fan-created Buck2 Discord server that I'd be happy to invite you to. Reach out to me on Discord (same username) and I'll get you an invite.

Awesome, sent you a friend request. I do think it would be important to make such a place more easily accessible by publicly linking to it, ideally even from the official buck2 website (it could be a section for "community channels", clearing indicating that it isn't official or run by Meta).

For some of the more complex pieces (e.g. improving external CI), we're aware of the pain points and are hoping to make some incremental steps to improving things.

Very happy to hear that, and I absolutely understand that these can be difficult to improve. That's partially why my initial thought process was mostly focused on communication and documentation, although they also take a good amount of effort of course.

[riggspc]

FYI - 4511af4

Thanks for the suggestion!

[cbarrete]

Related to community building IMO:

• Add a changelog/release notes #994
• Clarify expectations about external contributions #753

Those issues are quite different from one another, but I think that they both provide concrete suggestions for improvement.