[python-committers] Github reviews are cannibalizing BPO

[Donald Stufft]

> On May 2, 2017, at 3:42 PM, Donald Stufft <donald at stufft.io> wrote:
> 
> 
>> On May 2, 2017, at 3:09 PM, M.-A. Lemburg <mal at egenix.com <mailto:mal at egenix.com>> wrote:
>> 
>> This doesn't have much to do with UX/UI. It's mainly a questions
>> of culture. Github is more geared up for a culture of quick chat
>> style comments, whereas bpo has traditionally seen a more elaborate
>> in-depth discussions style.
> 
> 
> This is not really accurate to my experience using GitHub. In pip for example while we have distutils-sig and a pypa-dev mailing list we hardly ever use them for pip focused discussion. The vast bulk of our discussion (including quite long ones, and I think most folks who end up in a discussion with me know I can produce a fair amount of content in one) occur entirely within GitHub and it works just fine. I don’t think this is unique to pip either. Pretty much the only time we use anything but GitHub are when the blast radius for a change is larger then pip itself (e.g. something that touches pip, setuptools, and pypi) which we use distutils-sig for, or when something is just a notice that doesn’t require discussion, which we use pypa-dev for.
> 
> I agree that there are benefits to separating code review and issue tracking (although I’m not a purist about it, I think some PRs are too small to warrant an issue for instance) and I think that without some effort to automate and write a bot GitHub issues are not a good fit for replacing bpo. However I think it’s going to be a regular struggle to get people to try and primarily use bpo for issue discussion (vs code review) because the friction of doing so is fairly high. I think if you want to encourage people to utilize bpo better, your best bet is to do everything you can to reduce that friction.
> 


To touch on this a bit more, arguably GitHub is *more* suited to long form discussion, given that it includes the ability to format your text which is an incredibly important part of producing readable content more then a few sentences long. You can attempt to apply some of this with bpo using ASCII representations, but an inlined URL or a footnote to the URL is never going to be as good as a hyperlink, or an inlined image, or bold, italics, etc.


—
Donald Stufft



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