Mailman 3 June 2016 - Overload-sig

Experimenting on real-world groups with potential solutions
by Brett Cannon June 28, 2016

June 28, 2016

I'm willing to offer up python-ideas as an experimental group of people to try a new approach to communicating if we want to try something out on an existing mailing list that isn't as critical as python-dev. I also know that Donald has expressed interest in trying Discourse on distutils-sig as have I (I believe lack of time is what has prevented this experiment from occurring on Donald's side, definitely the reason I haven't tried Discourse on python-ideas).

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Discourse is Deployed
by Donald Stufft June 25, 2016

June 25, 2016

I’ve deployed discourse at https://discuss.python.org/ so you can go over there and create a new account. I suggest reading https://discuss.python.org/t/trying-out-discourse/13 first as I wrote down any notes that I thought were important about how I have it currently configured. — Donald Stufft

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Should we import old MM discussions into e.g. Discourse?
by Guido van Rossum June 24, 2016

June 24, 2016

I'm trying something new here: moving a reply to a different subject. On Thu, Jun 23, 2016 at 9:00 AM, Skip Montanaro <skip.montanaro(a)gmail.com> wrote: > > > On Thu, Jun 23, 2016 at 9:27 AM, Donald Stufft <donald(a)stufft.io> wrote: > >> For a short time period I think it’s fine to try and test >> the waters, but long term we should pick one tool, whatever that tool is, >> for this >> kind of discussion [1] and bless that and get rid of anything else. >> Whether that’s >> mailman or discourse or something else. >> > > If you decided that (for example) python-dev would move to Discourse, is > there > > a) some way to suck the old MM archives into Discourse? > > b) allow search engines to index them? > > It's not clear that the infinite scroll thing allows for (easy) indexing, > though I assume Google and Bing have their collective act together in this > regard. > > Would the MM->some-kind-of-forum decision be made on a list-by-list basis, > or would some lists always remain MM-hosted? I can see where the natives > might get very restless if you migrated comp.lang.python/ > python-list(a)python.org to some sort of forum tool. Python-dev or > python-ideas would be bad enough, but for c.l.p it would probably be > torches and pitchforks time. > I personally think that in this case (unlike hg->git) there is little benefit to importing old discussions. The old discussions *do* have permalinks, in pipermail and various other archives (e.g. activestate). Those links are already being used and we should try very hard not to break such links. That probably means keeping pipermail running forever, in read-only mode. FWIW I also don't think we need to shut down the existing mailing lists. They serve a purpose. But they should not be the only place where we discuss things (that's my definition of "forum" BTW) and probably not the busiest place. I hope we can move all lists on mail.python.org to MM3/HyperKitty with minimal disruption -- again I think it would be fine if the archives weren't imported, even if that means some threads will be split across two archival systems. That's not the end of the world. -- --Guido van Rossum (python.org/~guido)

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Issue tracker vs. real-time chat
by Guido van Rossum June 24, 2016

June 24, 2016

(We accidentally started this discussion on private email. I assume noone has a problem with me reposting this to the sig.) I'd like to put in a vote *for* systems or paradigms that behave more or less like issue trackers (AFAIC even Reddit and StackOverflow fall in this pattern) and *against* group chat systems (IRC, HipChat, Zulip, Slack, Skype, Hangouts). To be sure, I'm fine with the existence of chat systems, but I find participating in them exhausting, and they tend to have a very high noise level. They exacerbate the problem that only those who can keep up with the traffic know what's been discussed already (scrollback features in Slack etc. notwithstanding). Usually the mute control is too course. AFAIK only Zulip supports any kind of "topic" selection (Slack is based on group membership, and groups are relatively static, even though membership is dynamic). QUOTE from Kevin: I think we should definitely be seeing what we can do to improve the mailing list experience. :) I've not worked with Mailman 3 myself yet but it sounds like 3.0 is a pretty significant improvement. I was pretty curious about Posterious particularly, although I didn't manage to find an example of it online. Is there a good example to look at? In addition to that, I think we should also be looking at improvements for our bug trackers and chat software as part of this. Playing with GitHub's bug tracker may be a good start, and maybe something like Slack or Zulip for chat would be a nice improvement. I've gotten spoiled by the ability in Slack to see the conversations that happened while I was offline. I know Zulip, like Posterious, is a Django-based app, and it would be cool to have more of our infrastructure built on top of Python so long as it doesn't become a maintenance burden. Maybe the Zulip team would even be willing to help out? -- --Guido van Rossum (python.org/~guido)

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Sampling multiple options...
by Skip Montanaro June 23, 2016

June 23, 2016

I was going to ask why not try Discourse, but Guido beat me to it. Good thing I poked the "new mail" button in Gmail before hitting send. :-) I don't know what the timeframe for this sig is supposed to be, or how many options you want to more-or-less thoroughly examine, but it might be worthwhile to move it from one option to the next over the course of a few days|weeks|months. It might highlight a few things: * How hard is it to get started (spool up a new tool or group within a tool)? * How difficult is it for individual users to get up-to-speed with new tools? * What import/export features to the various tools support? I realize the last item isn't as high priority, but with such a short lifespan, it might be worthwhile to see (for example), how hard it is to import the modest MM archives into Discourse. If a decision to try another is made, then what's Discourse's export feature like (and/or the next tool's import feature)? You might also keep overload-sig active as a Gmane-ish mirror of the different options, presuming they support sending messages to email. You could just always use an email-to-<shiny new tool> each time you try another tool. I'm interested in this process partly because when I asked about getting help for the typeshed stub stuff, Guido said, "just use the Github issue tracker." That seemed completely foreign to me, so I have yet to try it, but it seems that is one of the options. I'd like to see if "getting help" mixes well with "discussing really important things" or "settling on a place for beer at PyCon". Someone mentioned they'd never heard of forums like VBulletin before. I'm not advocating them as a possible tool, however these sorts of forums exist all over the internet. Here are a few I follow in my alternate existence as a cyclist: http://www.bikeforums.net/ http://forums.thepaceline.net/ http://www.thechainlink.org/forum There are enough of these beasts that there are even apps to provide a more smartphone-friendly interface: https://tapatalk.com/ Again, I'm not advocating any of them as candidate tools. I suppose it might help to know who Discourse's and Telegram's ancestors are, though. :-) Skip

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