On Sat, 3 Nov 2018 at 17:32, Donald Stufft <donald@stufft.io> wrote:
On Nov 3, 2018, at 7:27 AM, Paul Moore <p.f.moore@gmail.com> wrote:
On Sat, 3 Nov 2018 at 01:27, Donald Stufft <donald@stufft.io> wrote:
Just an FYI, I’m going to ask the discuss.python.org admins to add a Packaging category to that discourse instance for the discussion of packaging in Python, basically as a sister discussion location to distutils-sig. I plan to primarily participate and centralize my own personal discussions there, although others are free to continue to discuss wherever they would like (although I think it would be great if folks would all jump over there as well!).
I’m not going to request any sub categories at this time, both because I don’t think our traffic is high enough to warrant it, and also because I think that tagging will be a more useful mechanism for us since we can tag things with relevant projects or whatever (or not tag things at all) and topics can have multiple tags.
For now, can I ask that any discussions that need my participation post here. I don't currently have the bandwidth to learn/follow Discourse, so I'm extremely likely to miss things that are posted on there. Specifically, any discussions around packaging standards that need a decision from me, or need my input, should take place on this list.
From a practical matter, as the BDFL-Delegate [1] it would be pretty hard to get a decision somewhere that you’re not participating in. My own personal motivation for client side has been pretty low lately, so I presume that the bulk of what I would be posting there would be related to the server side anyways. Of course I can’t control other people so if other people are posting there for client side stuff, then they’d have to summarize over here for you or something.
Indeed :-) I deliberately didn't put it like that as I didn't want to seem like I was making ultimatums (ultimata?) But I am increasingly concerned that the push to move away from the mailing lists to a mixture of web-based pull-style fora (forums? :-)) (github issues, discourse) is fragmenting the discussion base, and making it harder for *anyone* to have a good sense of "what is going on in the community". I don't have an answer (I understand that for you, the mailing list format is as problematic as the web forum format is for me) but I think we should be very cautious of experimenting here, without a better understanding of who will fall by the wayside and what we might lose.
[1] Although depending on which governance PEP gets selected, we may end up losing our BDFL-Delegate status as some of the proposals don’t grant the ability for the decision making entity to delegate their authority. Although other ones do, though it’s not clear if they grant them on a long standing basis or not, and at least one of them explicitly encodes in the idea of long standing delegations.
Which is largely irrelevant, as this is much less about decision makers and much more about building consensus. I don't know how we build any form of consensus if the whole community isn't communicating in a shared discussion :-( Paul