On 2020-07-29 22:51:37 -0400 (-0400), Sumana Harihareswara wrote: [...]
Jeremy, I'm not sure whether you were serious? If your disappointment is only out of nostalgia, then yeah, accepting change makes sense. But if your disappointment is because the Discourse experience is/will be worse for your participation, then it's totally fine to speak up and tell us how. [...]
Robert also pretty accurately described my challenges with Discourse, so I won't bother reiterating his points. I skim a good 1k mailing list messages daily across dozens of other communities and reply with the press of a key; mailing lists make that workflow easy compared conversation scattered between lots of different Web forum sites with mediocre SMTP notification and response, poor context quoting, et cetera. And I'm the sort of luddite who still laments that many of these communities didn't stick with Usenet, but remembering how the spam problem there got so out of control at a time before we had reasonable technologies to deal with it, I don't begrudge anyone the decision to abandon it. Basically I've come to accept that most of the Python packaging discussions lately have occurred entirely in a place where I've been unable to follow them and reply easily, and that seems to be the consensus choice of the Python community so I won't ask others to cater to my outmoded workflows nor to necessarily value the fluid sorts of cross-community participation they used to enable. It means that my voice won't be included often, if ever, and that I'll be less likely to find out tidbits like Setuptools 20.3 in October turning on the new dep solver (and that the many projects I'm involved in ought to test it and follow up with bug reports before they begin to impact our users). Still, there are plenty of other places I can spend my time and effort more effectively, so I'm not particularly bitter about it.
What if we bridged them, instead? Barry Warsaw in https://discuss.python.org/t/disappointed-and-overwhelmed-by-discourse/982/1... suggested:
My ultimate dream would be to add an IMAP and/or NNTP interface directly to [Mailman 3/HyperKitty]. Then I could use my normal mail application to catch up and interact with Mailman lists in a very lightweight way, driven entirely by my own workflow. That plus a Discourse bridge would be a pretty powerful and flexible combination.
Is that something that other folks here who have trouble with Discourse would find fruitful? If so, we can start pushing to make it happen.
The idea there wasn't particularly fleshed-out so it's hard to say. I'm assuming he meant a mechanism for mirroring/proxying conversations between Discourse and MM3; if so then, yes, that might help but there's really no way to know without a working prototype. It also sounds like rather a lot of work and I'm certainly not going to ask anyone else to expend effort just to cater to my personal workflows. Discourse is not to my taste, but de gustibus non est disputandum. -- Jeremy Stanley