Hi,
Since 2 or 3 years, I saw that that discussions on some PEPs get more and more emails every year. Maybe because Python became more popular? Openness is a Python quality, but shortly, the amount of emails becomes an issue, at least for the author of the PEP.
I counted the number of emails per day of the python-dev mailing list, using mbox archives available at: https://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/
My script: https://github.com/vstinner/misc/blob/master/python/parse_mailman_mbox.py
In March, python-dev got 246 emails with a maximum of 31 the 2018-03-21.
In April, the traffic was between 3 and 27 emails per day until the start of the chaos:
... 2018-04-17: 27 2018-04-18: 20 2018-04-19: 11 2018-04-20: 36 2018-04-21: 36 2018-04-22: 31 2018-04-23: 32 2018-04-24: 72 2018-04-25: 76 2018-04-26: 23 2018-04-27: 10
Current maximum: 76 emails received at 2018-04-25!?
I'm not sure that it's still possible to read carefully all emails to python-dev and write constructive replies. It seems like people are answering immediately, without reading past emails nor reading other emails sent the same day.
I'm also concerned by the general mood of the discussion. Are we still discussing arguments in polite way?
How can we calm down the discussion, and ask people to don't reply immediately but instead try to listen to the other people?
IHMO everybody had enough time to give their very important opinion (I wrote my own very important opinion, don't worry!) on python-ideas and then on python-dev. We are now turning around.
Can we give Chris more time to update his PEP? In my experience, the PEP is the most constructive tool to drive a discussion.
I chose to write to python-committers because I now fear that I would get too many replies on python-dev ...
Victor