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!