Especially on the eve of critical governance discussions that will heavily impact the future of python-dev.
Ironically it's the very gravity of those upcoming discussions that made us decide to move fast on this.
Part of why we are in this mess in the first place is due to inadequate moderation controls available on mailing lists and the way they invite thundering herds of answers and the combinatorial explosion of posts in trees of discussion. The PEP 572 process exercised this painfully well.
Discourse is a chance to address the problems that contributed to the BDFL stepping down.
arbitrary decision making
...
insufficiently representative group
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without involving most of the people affected
...
Hold on. Out of the 30-something committers active in the past two releases, 20-something were at the sprint. (I can pull more detailed stats but I'm on the phone now.) Setting up Discourse with the intent of replacing the mailing lists met no opposition at the sprint. By all counts, the group was sufficiently representative and involved most of the people affected.
I would prefer for everybody to be there, of course. Some decided against it, some could not be there even though they wanted to. This is unfortunate. But if you have committer unanimity in mind, that's not something that was feasible regardless of the forum.
- Ł