On Aug 15, 2016, at 12:38 PM, Brett Cannon <brett@python.org> wrote:
3. Test the platforms. So far we have:
(a) Mailman 2. Obsolete; I believe there is consensus that Mailman 3 is *already* a big improvement over Mailman 2.
(b) Mailman 3. Currently the most active channel for Overload-SIG. I believe there is no consensus: Mailing list advocates are happy with it, but at the present it doesn't help enough for those with (good) consumer-grade MUAs, and it can't solve the nonlinearity problem to the extent that discussants use mail.
For my own uses, MM3 does not appear to be much different than MM2 in how I use it. The centralized management is nice though, but for actual day to day usage it seems that attempting to really use it from anything but your mail client is less useful than using it from your mail client. The built in MUA/editor in Hyperkitty is so bare bones that it *feels* like you’re not actually supposed to use it for day to day usage. As it stand now, I’ve yet to actually completely send a message through it because it’s so basic that anything but a simple reply with no quoting it ends up getting awkward quickly. The overview page for a seems to have an OKish format for listing threads but if you go into the date based views for listing threads there’s pretty hard to read format with a lot of wasted space. It ends up being more frustrating to try and use this to read threads than it is to just use basically any MUA that handles grouping email by “topics” instead of just a big list of all emails. As someone who desperately wants to have a web based interaction with the mailing lists to be my primary interface, with optional email notifications/interaction for “important” things (someone wanting to call attention to a thread to me directly, or for threads that I think are important) I don’t really see the current state of HyperKitty being something that I could use for that.
(c) Discourse. Currently inactive. Consensus seems to be that it has many nice features, but overall the level of enthusiasm was not so high. (Sorry for the vagueness, please comment!)
I liked it and only stopped using it because I moved over to MM3 as the next experimental instance to try out (plus everyone else has seems to have moved over here).
I feel the same FWIW. Regardless of what happens here I may end up trying to move distutils-sig (or the packaging related discussion, even if it’s not still called “distutils-sig”) onto a Discourse instance and combining the PyPA dev channels with it. That can either take the form of piggybacking off of whatever python-dev does for a Discourse instance if we choose that, or standing up a dedicated instance.
(d) GitHub tracker. Unimplemented.
4. Identify features that help address issues defined in 1.
(a) Notifications of new threads.
(b) Priorization of "interesting" threads by personal criteria.
(c) Manual thread muting.
I think a+c == b (or at least it does for me).
It’s kind of like (c), but I think that can be generalized out to per-thread subscription settings. Some threads I want to get email on, some threads I want to only see online, some threads I never want to see. — Donald Stufft