Le sam. 3 nov. 2018 à 04:40, Eric Snow <ericsnowcurrently@gmail.com> a écrit :

Would it help if we only published who voted, and kept their votes private? Publishing the actual votes probably doesn't make a big difference here, relative to the broader Python/tech community.

The PEP has a whole section explaining the rationale: https://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-8001/#why-should-the-vote-be-public

This PEP has 9 authors and has been discussed in length.

Maybe we should stop to change the vote method? :-) (As I wrote, the last limit for me to changes the PEP 8001 is Nov. 15, the day before voting on governance PEPs starts.)

Victor

[Tim]

...

Nevertheless, I probably won't vote - I object to public ballots on principle. That's been raised by others, so I won't repeat the arguments, and I appear to be very much in a minority here.

[Eric Snow <ericsnowcurrently@gmail.com>]

Would it help if we only published who voted, and kept their votes private? Publishing the actual votes probably doesn't make a big difference here, relative to the broader Python/tech community.

That would probably be enough to convince me to vote, but I don't want to hold things up either. If I'm the only one, why bother? It's not like my vote will change the result ;-)

BTW, the years I was on the PSF Board, I always wanted everyone to know how we voted on everything. But I was elected to that position, so was voting as a representative of those who elected me.

But nobody has any more business knowing how I vote on a PEP than, say, how I vote for the local mayor. That's between me and my conscience. Your vote is between you and yours, and I want actively _not_ to be able to see how others voted.

Although I'm all in favor of making the PEP ballots public, if stripped of personally identifying info.

On Nov 3, 2018, at 12:38 AM, Donald Stufft <donald@stufft.io> wrote:

...

On Nov 3, 2018, at 12:20 AM, Tim Peters <tim.peters@gmail.com <mailto:tim.peters@gmail.com>> wrote:

[Tim]

...

...

Nevertheless, I probably won't vote - I object to public ballots on principle. That's been raised by others, so I won't repeat the arguments, and I appear to be very much in a minority here.

[Eric Snow <ericsnowcurrently@gmail.com <mailto:ericsnowcurrently@gmail.com>>]

...

Would it help if we only published who voted, and kept their votes private? Publishing the actual votes probably doesn't make a big difference here, relative to the broader Python/tech community.

That would probably be enough to convince me to vote, but I don't want to hold things up either. If I'm the only one, why bother? It's not like my vote will change the result ;-)

BTW, the years I was on the PSF Board, I always wanted everyone to know how we voted on everything. But I was elected to that position, so was voting as a representative of those who elected me.

But nobody has any more business knowing how I vote on a PEP than, say, how I vote for the local mayor. That's between me and my conscience. Your vote is between you and yours, and I want actively _not_ to be able to see how others voted.

Although I'm all in favor of making the PEP ballots public, if stripped of personally identifying info.

---

FWIW I tend to agree with Tim on public vs private ballots, although unlike him I don’t feel strongly enough to abstain from voting on this one particular vote.

On a practical matter, keeping the ballots secret will rely on either having a trusted person to tally the election results or using some software that will do it for us. There is https://civs.cs.cornell.edu <https://civs.cs.cornell.edu/> which we could use that does offer private ballots and offers making the ballots (with or without a name attached to them) public. It doesn’t support “pure” Condorcet but it should be easy enough to take the public but anonymous ballots and compute to determine if there was a condorcet winner or if one of the methods had to break a cycle, and if there wasn’t a condorcet winner, just re-run the election. Beyond that, I’m not sure what other options there are for anonymous ranked voting.

Oh, unfortunately this also doesn’t allow publishing *Who* voted without attaching them to a ballot, it’s either public, attached to the ballot, or private (if you’re not publishing the names, the system doesn’t even keep them, it just generates unique voter IDs for each).

[Victor Stinner <vstinner@redhat.com>]

I'm unhappy with the "[] Further discussion" choice. We have a governance crisis. Many people would like to see it resolved as soon as possible, I don't see the ability to vote for "[] Further discussion" as a way to resolve this crisis.

Nobody else does either. This was added for political reasons: it's _expected_ that virtually everyone will rank "Further discussion" last, so we can "prove" to the world that we really do want it to end ASAP. "See? We voted, and 'further discussion' came in dead last!"

There are 6 proposed governance PEPs (maybe 7? ;-)). I don't expect that everybody will agree on everything in a PEP, but everybody should be at least able to order them to vote, no? If no, well, maybe don't vote?

I'm missing context for this. Has someone complained about that? I _would_ ;-) , but why bother. Having to strictly rank forces people to fabricate distinctions they may not actually believe. A voting protocol that forces dishonesty isn't attractive. Note that Condorcet methods don't generally require this; for example, Schulze is happy if you rate any number of choices "all the same to me". If you in fact have no preference among (say) 3 of the PEPs, why must you be forced to say that you strictly most like just one of them - and strictly most dislike another?

"The reason" appears to be that the more of that people do, the more likely there won't be a Condorcet winner.

... I'm not surprised that someone doesn't like one part of the PEP 8001. But well, we need to move on and take a decision...

Sure!

...

"Pure Condorcet" is close to trivial to tally: there is a Condorcet winner, or there isn't. I wouldn't even bother to write code to figure it out. For example, write a simple script to convert each ballot to a single line for the following web page, paste the ballots into the text box, and click the "Calculate all winners" button:

https://www.cse.wustl.edu/~legrand/rbvote/calc.html

Yes, I'm asking for such script. I didn't say that it would be overcomplicated.

Well, that professor already wrote one. Give me the task of tallying the ballots. and I'd do just what I said above :-)

The PEP 8001 is not trivial, it expects a specific format:

**DO NOT LEAVE ANY BRACKETS BLANK!** **DO NOT REPEAT A RANKING/NUMBER!**

Maybe it would help to have a script to validate my own vote? (Also ensure that all choices are present?)

Someone will have to do that, but it's a different issue than I was answering above: your original "Which tool can be used to compute the vote result?".

... Hum, it seems like you are unhappy with the chosen voting method.

Not at all! If we had used a ranked ballot in the poll, "Pure Condorcet" would have been my #1 choice. For this election.

Again, we have to move on and take a decision.

Yup. In the poll, I voted "approve" for everything, but retracted my vote for IRV after it was pointed out that _other_ PEPs pointed back at 8001 to define the voting method _they_ used too. I was willing to endure IRV for a PEP 8001 one-shot vote, but not for eternity.

I could live with any of the other methods forever, but if we had a PEP on voting methods in general, _then_ I'd push for hybrid score-runoff methods, like STAR and 3-2-1. They're much easier to understand, and do better in large-scale voting simulations, than the others.

We cannot discuss voting methods forever, and there is no perfect voting methods. Only tradeoffs.

Which I know ;-) But some nevertheless do better than others under very widely varying assumptions. That's why, e.g., absolutely nobody is in favor of plurality. "But nothing is perfect" isn't actually a reason for accepting something that's awful in ordinary conditions ;-)

The best of the Condorcet methods are in fact very good.

I looked at the length of the discussion, and I understood that everybody had the opportunity to express their opinion, and the discussion gone deeply in voting methods, as Carol, I was impressed by the level of the discussion :-)

[Victor Stinner <vstinner@redhat.com>]

...

The PEP 8001 is not trivial, it expects a specific format:

**DO NOT LEAVE ANY BRACKETS BLANK!** **DO NOT REPEAT A RANKING/NUMBER!**

[Nathaniel Smith <njs@pobox.com>]

I'm not sure what the motivation for those restrictions is. I guess with IRV there isn't an obvious way to handle a repeated number,

FWIW, I've never seen any IRV variant that allowed duplicate rankings. And I don't see how it could: at each round it's counting only the number of _first_ ranked candidates among those who remain, and if a voter had ties for their first place candidates that voter would be helping multiple candidates survive the round. "Not fair."

but with Condorcet it's no problem. And both methods are fine with leaving some options blank (it's equivalent to ranking the blank options as tied for dead last).

But leaving some candidates unrated is common in IRV schemes. When the last of a given ballot's rated candidates is eliminated, that ballot is thrown out and the election continues as if it had never existed (in particular, it no longer counts for the "majority" needed to win the next round).

PEP 8001 says:

""" A vote which omits candidates in the ranking is invalid. This is because such votes are incompatible with the desired properties listed above, namely:

Making voters consider alternatives, as well as Doing everything possible to reach a conclusion in a single election. """

The first point is dubious. While it may be hard to prove, what will happen in reality is that some voters will simply make up rankings for PEPs they never even read. This is so common in forced-ranking systems that it has a name:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donkey_vote

There may be some merit to the second point, and especially if donkey-voting is common: the more people mindlessly give a rank equal to a candidate's distance from the top, the less likely cycles are to form (assuming all ballots list the PEPs in the same order - which they really shouldn't, but probably will ;-) ).

In any case, without IRV there's scant reason to require that all ranks be distinct, and I think dropping that requirement would be a serious improvement, both for making it easier to construct a valid ballot, and especially to allow voters more possibility to express their true preferences (including "these two, three, ... are equally fine by me").

What may be hard to get across then is that, e.g., the ballot rankings

1 1 1 6 6 6

and 5 5 5 6 6 6

have exactly the same effect: "I like the first three better than the last three - maybe a little, maybe a lot, you just can't tell from what I'm allowed to express."

Le sam. 3 nov. 2018 à 10:39, Antoine Pitrou <antoine@python.org> a écrit :

...

I'm unhappy with the "[] Further discussion" choice. We have a governance crisis. Many people would like to see it resolved as soon as possible, I don't see the ability to vote for "[] Further discussion" as a way to resolve this crisis.

Why are you worried? If many people would like to see the "crisis" (I would call it a void) resolved early, then probably "Further discussion" won't win. So how is its presence a problem?

PEPs cannot be approved since July. It seems like we will not be able to approve PEPs before January, even if a governance PEP is approved and a new council/committee/whatever is elected.

There was a discussion abouge BDFL-delegate for Jeroen Demeyer's PEP 580 which has been somehow blocked (sorry, I didn't follow closely the discussion, so I'm not sure of the outcome).

I would prefer the situation to be unblocked as soon as possible to unblock Python 3.8. Otherwise, Python 3.8 will be the release of the governance crisis with no large new features.

I know that at least two core developers have pending PEPs that they didn't publish because there is nobody to approve PEPs.

Victor

On Nov 2, 2018, at 20:24, Tim Peters <tim.peters@gmail.com> wrote:

Nevertheless, I probably won't vote - I object to public ballots on principle. That's been raised by others, so I won't repeat the arguments, and I appear to be very much in a minority here.

I also prefer private ballots on principle, but I’ll still vote if they are public. I don’t completely buy into the rationale in PEP 8001 on why they must be public.

-Barry

On Nov 3, 2018, at 2:06 PM, Barry Warsaw <barry@python.org> wrote:

I also prefer private ballots on principle, but I’ll still vote if they are public. I don’t completely buy into the rationale in PEP 8001 on why they must be public.

So to avoid just complaining without an actionable suggestion, here’s a suggestion:

Use https://civs.cs.cornell.edu with the following settings (x in the ones turned on):

[x] Private [ ] Make this a test poll: read all votes from a file. [ ] Do not release results to all voters. [x] Enable detailed ballot reporting. [ ] In detailed ballot report, also reveal the identity of the voter with each ballot. [ ] Allow voters to write in new choices. [ ] Present choices on voting page in exactly the given order. [ ] Allow voters to select “no opinion” for some choices. [ ] Enforce proportional representation

This best represents the current behavior, while moving us to use a secret ballot. Voting in this system looks like an email like https://s.caremad.io/9i63IkqBppKMudh/ <https://s.caremad.io/9i63IkqBppKMudh/> which includes in it a link to vote. Going to that link gives you a page like https://s.caremad.io/TDQWB0wv4FDx3I9/ <https://s.caremad.io/TDQWB0wv4FDx3I9/>. Which has some Ui affordances for dragging/dropping to re-order or to allow you to use a drop down to select your winner. Once you submit your vote, you’re given a page like https://s.caremad.io/HszGnDfDJQ725YX/ <https://s.caremad.io/HszGnDfDJQ725YX/>. Once the election is over, the results are available and look like https://s.caremad.io/4Wcy5InXoLjV7MU/ <https://s.caremad.io/4Wcy5InXoLjV7MU/> (after you click a button to see more results).

This has the following properties:

• People’s identities are kept secret.
  • This assume that the people running that online system are discarding the votes like they claim to be. I don’t think they’re likely to be lying and it’s a popular online service so they’re unlikely to do anything about it.
• The actual ballots are public, and available to be viewed and even downloaded in CSV format.
• The results are computed, although none of the options are for “pure” condorcet, we can use the CSV format to compute it how we like to verify that there was a pure condorcet winner.
• As a downside, the list of people who voted are *not* made public (it considers not participating at all to be something that deserves secret as well).
• As an upside, it will randomize the order ballots are in by default, and there is science/evidence to suggest that when ballots are in the same order for everyone, that items closer to the top of the ballot are more likely to win. Randomizing ballot order helps with this.
• It doesn’t require you to make a total ranking of all the options (it allows you to rank some items equal). This is fine with Condorcet (it just means a cycle is more likely).
• A single person has to act as the election administrator, which basically only gives the power to start/stop the election and to add voters (you can’t add the same email address twice, doing so just re-sends the email to that person).

On Nov 3, 2018, at 4:45 PM, Donald Stufft <donald@stufft.io> wrote:

One thing we need if we do go this route, is a single person to act as the election supervisor. Their powers are limited basically they configure the election, adding a description, the choices, etc and then they have the power to start the election, add voters via email addresses, and then end the election. All of these are manual action items, but the system automatically generates result emails and voter emails and such.

So if we go this route, we’d have to pick that person. I poked Ernest Durbin to see if he’d be willing to do that. I figure we’d make a good candidate for election supervisor (again, if we go that route) since he’s a PSF employee, he’s well known enough in the community and generally trusted (he has root on all the boxes pretty much, so he can do a lot of damage if he wanted) and he’s not a core developer, so he’s about as close to a trusted, but neutral party as we’re likely to find. He said he’d absolutely be willing to handle that if we want.

Here is a PR that implements this https://github.com/python/peps/pull/830 <https://github.com/python/peps/pull/830>. Not going to merge it myself, just figured I’d offer it as an alternative option.

On Nov 3, 2018, at 11:56 PM, Tim Peters <tim.peters@gmail.com> wrote:

[Donald Stufft <donald@stufft.io>]

...

So to avoid just complaining without an actionable suggestion, here’s a suggestion:

Use https://civs.cs.cornell.edu with the following settings (x in the ones turned on):

Presumably someone is "running" this election, but I don't know who. Do we believe they're paying attention to this list? Or are they focused on the Discourse site now?: I'd hate to see this possibility get lost:

I’ll mirror this over to discourse in a bit, or maybe tomorrow.

...

... pure condorcet winner.

• The results are computed, although none of the options are for “pure” condorcet, we can use the CSV format to compute it how we like to verify that there was a

The test poll you constructed didn't have a Condorcet winner. Looking at other public polls on that site, I noticed that when there _was_ a Condorcet winner, the results page said

(Condorcet winner: wins contests with all other choices)

next to the winning candidate. Given that the results page also gives a color-coded matrix of pairwise preference counts, verifying this is trivial by eyeball (the winning candidate is in the top row, and is a Condorcet winner if and only if all the cells in the top row are colored green (excluding the extreme northwest cell, which is always blank) - which means the top-row candidate outright won against every other candidate - which is what "pure Condorcet winner" means).

You’re right. I simulated an election without a Condorcet winner, but where the voting mechanisms would otherwise select a winner (just using the example from the Schulze Wikipedia page), it says "(Not defeated in any contest vs. another choice)”, instead. An example can be found at: https://civs.cs.cornell.edu/cgi-bin/results.pl?num_winners=1&id=E_4191dbfb94efecb6&algorithm=beatpath <https://civs.cs.cornell.edu/cgi-bin/results.pl?num_winners=1&id=E_4191dbfb94efecb6&algorithm=beatpath>.

Just for kicks I added enough ballots so that there would be a Condorcet winner, and I verified that the above is true, and an example can be found at https://civs.cs.cornell.edu/cgi-bin/results.pl?num_winners=1&id=E_31f80ce0986ce98c&algorithm=beatpath <https://civs.cs.cornell.edu/cgi-bin/results.pl?num_winners=1&id=E_31f80ce0986ce98c&algorithm=beatpath>.

So that means if we go with it, we can let CIVS tally for us and we’ll just look for a Condorcet winner instead of another kind of winner. Of course since all of the anonymized ballots are public, people are free to compute it themselves as well.

...

• As a downside, the list of people who voted are *not* made public (it considers not participating at all to be something that deserves secret as well).

Indeed, it appears that even the election supervisor has no way to find out who did and didn't vote. Although, from the Security page:

""" The election supervisor can determine whether a voter has voted only with the permission of the voter and only after the election has ended. “""

Maybe they mean that if you contact them they can look that information up? I’m looking and I don’t see any UI that lets me do that, so either it’s not implemented, it was removed, I’m missing it, or it requires contacting them.

...

• It doesn’t require you to make a total ranking of all the options (it allows you to rank some items equal). This is fine with Condorcet (it just means a cycle is more likely).

We can worry about that when it doesn't happen anyway ;-)

It can also optionally let people pick no opinion, though I’m not sure of the utility of that. It basically means, as I understand it, that in any pairwise contest that includes a option you had no opinion on, your ballot would just not be included. The FAQ on this says:

What does “no opinion” mean? It means you are providing no information about how this choice ranks with respect to the other choices. For example, if you give one choice the rank 1, and give all other choices the rank “no opinion”, your ballot becomes useless because it doesn't express any preferences. Voters often pick “no opinion” when what they mean is that they don't like the choice or that they don't have any information about it. In these situations, it is often better to give the choice a low rank rather than to select “no opinion”. A good reason for a voter to give a choice the rank “no opinion” is because the voter isn't supposed to express an opinion about that choice.

It sounds to me like no opinion is a bit of a footgun here, so I think it makes sense not to allow it (probably the case of where you don’t have an opinion, you’re better off just ranking it last like the FAQ suggests).

...

• A single person has to act as the election administrator, which basically only gives the power to start/stop the election and to add voters (you can’t add the same email address twice, doing so just re-sends the email to that person).

So the admin _could_, e.g., add a hundred sock puppet email addresses, and effectively give them self a hundred votes. We couldn't tell, other than noting that the total vote count seemed too high.

Which I don't really care about. The CIVS service is good enough for me - and likely far better than anything people who just can't believe running an election can present any real difficulties will come up with off the top of their heads ;-)

Yea. And my suggestion of Ernest is that well, an evil Ernest can already fuck shit up for the Python community way beyond trying to change how we make decisions about PEPs and such (and he’s not a core dev, so he doesn’t have a horse in this race). Although I don’t really care who runs it, I think anyone here is going to be honest about it.

I can say as a supervisor you also can’t see how people have voted at all until after the voting ends. You can only see how many people voted. This makes it harder to meaningfully influence the election because you won’t be able to make targeted, strategic puppet votes without either doing it blindly or flooding the votes to a degree that it would be obvious.

[Tim]

...

... when there _was_ a Condorcet winner, the results page said

(Condorcet winner: wins contests with all other choices)

next to the winning candidate. Given that the results page also gives a color-coded matrix of pairwise preference counts, verifying this is trivial by eyeball ... if and only if all the cells in the top row are colored green ...

[Donald]

You’re right. I simulated an election without a Condorcet winner, but where the voting mechanisms would otherwise select a winner (just using the example from the Schulze Wikipedia page), it says "(Not defeated in any contest vs. another choice)”, instead.

Errrrrrrr ... I wonder why?! I had seen that in one of the public polls, but in that case the winner's row was all green except for a single yellow square. which meant the winner _tied_ with another in a one-on-one contest. So "not defeated" was correct. But here:

An example can be found at: https://civs.cs.cornell.edu/cgi-bin/results.pl?num_winners=1&id=E_4191dbfb94efecb6&algorithm=beatpath.

there's a red square in the winner's (top) row: the winner (E) _lost_, 24 to 21, to #3 (C). It's just not true that E wasn't defeated in any one-on-one contest.

Oh well. Best to ignore the words and look at the colors instead :-)

Just for kicks I added enough ballots so that there would be a Condorcet winner, and I verified that the above is true, and an example can be found at https://civs.cs.cornell.edu/cgi-bin/results.pl?num_winners=1&id=E_31f80ce0986ce98c&algorithm=beatpath.

Yup - and top row all green.

So that means if we go with it, we can let CIVS tally for us and we’ll just look for a Condorcet winner instead of another kind of winner.

Yes, it will tell us instantly (when the election ends) whether there's a Condorcet winner, and regardless of which method's radio button happens to be selected.

Of course since all of the anonymized ballots are public, people are free to compute it themselves as well.

And I bet someone will. I'm too old ;-)

...

... """ The election supervisor can determine whether a voter has voted only with the permission of the voter and only after the election has ended. “""

Maybe they mean that if you contact them they can look that information up? I’m looking and I don’t see any UI that lets me do that, so either it’s not implemented, it was removed, I’m missing it, or it requires contacting them.

Can't help, beyond noting that the election supervisor sure doesn't appear to have any mechanical way to prove a voter gives permission - and since their side threw away voters' email addresses, they have no way to contact voters to ask either.

They do save crypto hashes of email addresses, so perhaps if you asked them, they could give you a magic string you could in turn give to a voter who in turn could send that string back to them from the same email address they used to vote. Or something ;-)

... It can also optionally let people pick no opinion, though I’m not sure of the utility of that. It basically means, as I understand it, that in any pairwise contest that includes a option you had no opinion on, your ballot would just not be included.

In effect, I bet that's all there is to it. If there are C candidates, all these methods start by building a CxC matrix M such that M[i, j] counts the number of ballots that ranked candidate i higher than candidate j.

If a full set of distinct rankings is required, then for every ballot, exactly one of M[i, j] and M[j,i] will be incremented for every i != j pair.

If i != j are ranked the same on some ballot, then neither M[i, j] nor M[j, i] will be incremented for that ballot.

If i is missing on some ballot, then M[i, j] and M[j, i] will be left alone for all j for that ballot.

The FAQ on this says:

What does “no opinion” mean? It means you are providing no information about how this choice ranks with respect to the other choices. For example, if you give one choice the rank 1, and give all other choices the rank “no opinion”, your ballot becomes useless because it doesn't express any preferences. Voters often pick “no opinion” when what they mean is that they don't like the choice

In that case they should rank it near the bottom instead.

or that they don't have any information about it.

Which is surely what it's _intended_ to be used for! "No opinion", in which case the ballot doesn't pretend the missing choice is either better or worse than any other choice. You're leaving its fate entirely to people who _do_ have an opinion then.

In these situations, it is often better to give the choice a low rank rather than to select “no opinion”. A good reason for a voter to give a choice the rank “no opinion” is because the voter isn't supposed to express an opinion about that choice.

Heh - who runs a vote where voters aren't "supposed" to express their opinions? Or is this site hosted in the DPRK? ;-)

It sounds to me like no opinion is a bit of a footgun here, so I think it makes sense not to allow it (probably the case of where you don’t have an opinion, you’re better off just ranking it last like the FAQ suggests).

I'd disallow it, but because it's likely to be misunderstood. The _usual_ treatment of missing rankings in a Condorcet scheme is that they're shorthand for saying "least favored". For example, in a 17-person primary, you just rank your 3 favorites, and it's understood that the other 14 are all tied for last place in your eyes.

That's _very_ different from treating them as "no opinion". In the primary, you're recording 3 losses for each of the missing 14, and you wholly _intend_ to give them those losses.

... Yea. And my suggestion of Ernest is that well, an evil Ernest can already fuck shit up for the Python community way beyond trying to change how we make decisions about PEPs and such (and he’s not a core dev, so he doesn’t have a horse in this race). Although I don’t really care who runs it, I think anyone here is going to be honest about it.

I can say as a supervisor you also can’t see how people have voted at all until after the voting ends. You can only see how many people voted. This makes it harder to meaningfully influence the election because you won’t be able to make targeted, strategic puppet votes without either doing it blindly or flooding the votes to a degree that it would be obvious.

No problem here with any of that. Potential dishonesty in PythonLand is far less a problem than that we fail to get anything done fretting about proving how nothing could possibly be manipulated. In fact, we could almost certainly trust any one of the competing PEP's authors to tally the votes, destroy the ballots, and just tell us who won :--)

[Guido]

Is it safe for people not interested in voting systems to ignore the rest of this thread?

Have you used mailing lists before? ;-) The topics in this particular thread have, e.g., ranged from voting systems (the specific message you're replying to), through whether and why Discourse does or doesn't suck, to concerns about how it's possible for someone with a life to make informed choices among the governance PEPs themselves.

So far as the voting system alone goes, "probably safe". Donald already moved that specific part to Discourse. His announcement of that here crossed in the mail with the message you're replying to. So scant point to muting this thread on _that_ count. The three messages newer than yours in this thread didn't even mention the voting system.

I hope that if there's an update on the voting period or specifics on how to vote (or what the choices are) these will be posted to a new thread.

See? Another topic that's not about voting systems. I hope so too, but can't answer because I'm not in charge of anything here (and neither is Donald). But I _expect_ that if info people absolutely need to know changes, whoever makes that decision will announce it both here and on Discourse in visible ways.

On 11/03/2018 03:55 AM, Paul Moore wrote:

Frankly, I feel pretty disenfranchised by the process at the moment.

+1

-- ~Ethan~

Le 03/11/2018 à 16:19, Stefan Krah a écrit :

On Sat, Nov 03, 2018 at 07:22:21AM -0700, Ethan Furman wrote:

...

On 11/03/2018 03:55 AM, Paul Moore wrote:

...

Frankly, I feel pretty disenfranchised by the process at the moment.

+1

I wouldn't go as far as disenfranchised, but just this thread made it clear to me that taking in information is at least 10x faster if presented on a mailing list.

Discourse feels like eating soup with a fork, especially now that the volume is higher.

Indeed. As soon as a discussion is starting to become branchy, Discourse just ruins readability compared to a normal threaded discussion system. The electoral system discussion is an example of that: https://discuss.python.org/t/python-governance-electoral-system/290

Regards

Antoine.

On Nov 3, 2018, at 1:24 PM, Donald Stufft <donald@stufft.io> wrote:

...

On Nov 3, 2018, at 11:22 AM, Antoine Pitrou <antoine@python.org> wrote:

Le 03/11/2018 à 16:19, Stefan Krah a écrit :

...

On Sat, Nov 03, 2018 at 07:22:21AM -0700, Ethan Furman wrote:

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On 11/03/2018 03:55 AM, Paul Moore wrote:

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Frankly, I feel pretty disenfranchised by the process at the moment.

+1

I wouldn't go as far as disenfranchised, but just this thread made it clear to me that taking in information is at least 10x faster if presented on a mailing list.

Discourse feels like eating soup with a fork, especially now that the volume is higher.

Indeed. As soon as a discussion is starting to become branchy, Discourse just ruins readability compared to a normal threaded discussion system. The electoral system discussion is an example of that: https://discuss.python.org/t/python-governance-electoral-system/290

Huh, I found the experience exactly the opposite. I was just remarking last night how glad I was that the discussion happened in discourse instead of on the mailing list, because of how poorly I felt the discussion would have gone on a mailing list. The ability to trivially multi quote alone was a drastic improvement, much less the ability to control, on a topic by topic basis, what level of notification I wanted for that topic.

Perhaps the difference is in that every mail client I’ve ever used presents mailing list threads (or any thread) as a singular flat stream anyways? To be honest, I find the threaded views on like hyper kitty or piper mail to be abysmal anyways :|

On Nov 3, 2018, at 1:42 PM, Antoine Pitrou <antoine@python.org> wrote:

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Perhaps the difference is in that every mail client I’ve ever used presents mailing list threads (or any thread) as a singular flat stream anyways?

Er, really? Generally they give you an option to turn on or off threaded display. And that in itself is a huge advantage: you can change the setting at will, depending on your preference. Often you can even do so on a per-folder or per-account basis (at least with Thunderbird you do).

GMail’s webmail and Mail.app are really the only two mail clients I’ve used in the past decade or so to be honest. I think I used thunderbird for a few weeks when I was a teenager but I honestly don’t even remember anything about it (and I barely got any email back then so I think I just used the default).

TBH I find threaded views nonsensical in every medium I’ve ever seen them in, even things like Reddit or the such feel really poor to me. Either the threading is so in your face that the same points end up getting repeated at different sub threads, or the threading is so minimal that people are replying to things cross sub-thread and treating it like a “flat” discussion.

On Nov 3, 2018, at 1:57 PM, Antoine Pitrou <antoine@python.org> wrote:

I find it interesting that you are so disturbed by threaded discussion views, while for some other people it's the reverse. That advocates for a system that allows both kinds of presentation, and Discourse isn't that.

I would agree *if* that was the only axis that the two tools differed on. (Un)fortunately there is a laundry list of improvements over the traditional mailing list this is available in modern mechanisms for facilitating discussion that mailing lists lack. Even something as simple as being able to decide on a topic by topic basis whether you want to receive emails on that topic. Unfortunately it’s hard to impossible to retrofit these items onto email, because email has a lowest common denominator problem where you can’t meaningfully improve it, because you can’t break support with the huge deployment base of every mail client ever.

If there were a system that offered even most of the benefits, but allowed someone switching between tree view and flat view, I’d be all for it. However all of the modern systems I’m aware of only allow one or the other.

To be honest, I’m not even sure how you’d represent some of these things in a threaded view. For instance within discourse I can multi quote different posts to tie multiple lines of discussion together. How would you present that in a threaded view? A merge? I’m not aware of any threaded system that actually allows it.

On 11/03/2018 11:45 AM, Donald Stufft wrote:

I would agree *if* that was the only axis that the two tools differed on.

It's enough for me. My participation on Discourse is going to be so low you might think I went emeritus. :/

(Un)fortunately there is a laundry list of improvements over the traditional mailing list

Which are all irrelevant if we don't use the tool itself. It's like my wife wanting to reduce my sodium intake by buying reduced-sodium peanut butter -- it worked! I don't eat that peanut butter. ;)

-- ~Ethan~

Le 03/11/2018 à 20:15, Donald Stufft a écrit :

I’m the other way. I basically don’t participate in python-dev or python-ideas anymore because of the issues mailing lists have.

Just a question: which tool do you use to participate in distutils-sig discussions, then?

Regards

Antoine.

On Nov 3, 2018, at 3:19 PM, Donald Stufft <donald@stufft.io> wrote:

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On Nov 3, 2018, at 3:17 PM, Antoine Pitrou <antoine@python.org <mailto:antoine@python.org>> wrote:

Le 03/11/2018 à 20:15, Donald Stufft a écrit :

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I’m the other way. I basically don’t participate in python-dev or python-ideas anymore because of the issues mailing lists have.

Just a question: which tool do you use to participate in distutils-sig discussions, then?

It’s the only mailing list (well besides this one, but this one only because it’s low traffic enough normally I didn’t filter it out into a folder to ignore) I still actively participate in. Even there I’ve been consciously pushing more of my own traffic to GitHub, or avoiding doing things that would require discussion on distutils-sig instead working on things that I could discuss entirely on GitHub.

My experience with the Governance discussion lead me to post https://mail.python.org/mm3/archives/list/distutils-sig@python.org/message/V... <https://mail.python.org/mm3/archives/list/distutils-sig@python.org/message/VXXPZCVRLH27N46TR3P6IEOKIA47POCM/> last night, so I’m pulling myself generally out of distutils-sig as well.

Oh yea, and I forgot to mention that I’ve been trying to advocate for pulling the packaging tools out of the PEP process and into our own process, ideally based on GitHub or Discourse or anything with modern UI affordances. That’s not entirely due to the pain of mailing lists, but that’s part of it.

On 11/03/2018 12:32 PM, Donald Stufft wrote:

I don’t mean to suggest that my participation is make or break for these lists. If I was the only one who felt this way, then I think it would be fair to say that I’m in the minority and while we want to encourage everyone, we can’t please everyone. I was merely trying to express that the choice isn’t move from mailing list to discourse and maybe exclude some people, or stay on mailing lists and exclude nobody. Either choice is going to be excluding some people.

Sounds like python-dev should take a break from Python and create the ideal communication software so all of us can contribute with as few headaches as possible.

-- ~Ethan~

Le 03/11/2018 à 19:41, Tim Peters a écrit :

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You're basically forced to accept the flat discussion view, which is completely unworkable to review a long and branchy discussion.

There are two more fundamental problems with long and branchy discussions: they're long, and they're branchy ;-)

But they are also unavoidable in any realistic setting. The idea of Discourse seems to discourage such discussions entirely. But that only works when the problems are simple and well-defined enough.

Regards

Antoine.

Le 03/11/2018 à 20:07, Tim Peters a écrit :

[Antoine]

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...

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You're basically forced to accept the flat discussion view, which is completely unworkable to review a long and branchy discussion.

[Tim]

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There are two more fundamental problems with long and branchy discussions: they're long, and they're branchy ;-)

[Antoine]

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But they are also unavoidable in any realistic setting. The idea of Discourse seems to discourage such discussions entirely. But that only works when the problems are simple and well-defined enough.

If your idea of what "works" is the typical long-and-branchy contentious thread on Python-Ideas, we have incompatible views of what "works" means ;-)

That's a complete strawman. python-ideas is a failure, and it would be as much of a failure with a non-threaded discussion system.

The "Python Governance Electoral System" thread is as long and branchy as a discussion has gotten there, but is more :"civilized" and on-topic than most mailing list threads of similar complexity I've seen in recent years.

Yes, but why? Because everyone really wants the governance discussions to succeed (and to succeed as soon as possible), so they make an extra effort to avoid derailing them. Such self-discipline doesn't prevail for the more usual python-dev discussions (let alone python-ideas which is its own universe). People are human beings, they get carried away, and I'm sure they will on Discourse too (unless they entirely refrain from posting because they can't stand the discussion system, that is).

Regards

Antoine.

Le 03/11/2018 à 20:34, Tim Peters a écrit :

This may be a clear demonstration of one way Discourse "works better": the "conversation" we're having here is really of little value to anyone, including to us.

How does Discourse "work better", exactly? The long-winded discussion on variants of voting systems (with close to 100 messages) isn't exactly *important* except for voting system nerds. The subthread you started about the "3-2-1" system was of close to no value, since you admitted yourself that that system is too young and immature to be chosen, and you were only "planting a seed" (and probably enjoying yourself a bit in the process). Yet it seems Discourse didn't discourage you from doing so. Why?

Well, because people making tangents on topics they like to talk about is irrelevant to the discussion system used (and your own behaviour proves it). The only way you can prevent tangents is by preventing discussion altogether.

*However*, an important feature of a discussion system is to help skipping tangents you're not interested about. A threaded discussion system makes it very easy to ignore a subthread. Not so much where the various subthreads are intermingled in a flat chronologic view.

Regards

Antoine.

Le 03/11/2018 à 22:30, Tim Peters a écrit :

[Antoine]

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How does Discourse "work better", exactly?

Several examples have already been given. You're determined to hate it, and that's fine.

That's an idiotic statement and an unwarranted personal attack. If that's all you're taking from this discussion then we might just end it here (especially as you previously mentioned you would stop posting, a promise which apparently you weren't able to keep).

On Sat, Nov 03, 2018 at 01:24:46PM -0400, Donald Stufft wrote:

Huh, I found the experience exactly the opposite. I was just remarking last night how glad I was that the discussion happened in discourse instead of on the mailing list, because of how poorly I felt the discussion would have gone on a mailing list. The ability to trivially multi quote alone was a drastic improvement,

I don't know what "multi quote" means, unless it means quoting multiple people's text in your reply. (Which I can do in email by copying and pasting.)

Can you link to an example of this useful multi quoting please?

-- Steve

On Sat, Nov 03, 2018 at 10:55:14AM +0000, Paul Moore wrote: [...]

Currently, I feel like my only option is to abstain and hope - I don't have the time (or knowledge) to review, understand and assess the proposals well enough to make an informed vote, but I have no way of assessing the "expert opinions" of those who do, to allow me to make a broad judgement. Frankly, I feel pretty disenfranchised by the process at the moment.

I think that there are legitimate criticisms of the way this transition and the discussion has been handled. (Such as the fragmentation of discussion and the difficulty in discovering where the pieces are.)

But let's be fair to those who have put in the effort to make this work so far. "Disenfranchisement" is not even close to a fair criticism.

Nobody has said you can't vote. Nobody is stripping you of your commit bit, or your status as core dev. Nobody is going to tell you that you can't vote because your name is similar to a convicted felon three states away, or force you to stand in line for 16 hours at the one polling booth for twenty miles on election day, and then turn you away because you have the wrong kind of ID. Nobody is passing laws to strip you of your ability to vote because of entirely spurious fears of "voter fraud". (The actual fraud being legimate voters being disenfranchised because they're poor or the wrong colour.)

With respect Paul, if we aren't willing to make even a minimal effort to make an informed vote, that's not disenfranchisement, that's just "can't be bothered".

"Can't be bothered" is a perfectly legitimate choice here -- I'm still considering it for myself. But I don't see how your current position is justified: as I read your post, your complaint is that you don't want to actually vote yourself, you don't have the time or inclination to study the proposals and make an informed choice, but you're disturbed that you don't know whether or not other people are likely to make the choice you would make if you did make an informed choice, which you aren't planning on doing.

"I know nothing about the issues, but I want to be sure everyone else will vote they way I would vote if I did."

I don't see how this is even possible. With respect, I think the answer to that is, well duh, if you don't vote or take part in the discussion, don't be surprised if people don't vote they way you want them to :-)

In any case, as I said, I think there are legitimate criticisms to be made. E.g. I think the decision to move the discussion to Discourse in the middle of the governance crisis was overly optimistic, the timing was not well thought-out, and making that decision behind closed doors and then announcing it as a fait acompli was certainly not living up to the ideals of openess, consideration and community-engagement that we claim to follow:

https://discuss.python.org/t/python-committers-is-dead-long-live-discuss-pyt...

https://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-committers/2018-September/006187.ht...

But what's done is done, and we can't say we weren't informed or asked to open an account on Discourse.

But none of these criticisms are so serious as to bring the whole exercise into doubt. If we want to vote, we can. If we want to make an *informed* vote, we can read the PEPs:

https://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-8000/

and we can start a discussion here or on Discourse.

Or if we want to just trust the rest of the community to do the right thing, that's a legitimate position too.

You've done the right thing asking about the discussion, and I'm sad that nobody has answered your question:

how can I trust that the decision will be one I can be comfortable with - and how do I influence the direction except by participating in the discussions I've been unable to locate?

That's a reasonable question. I wish I had a better answer, but I too have found it exceedingly hard to locate discussions. I know there has been some here, and some on Discourse (which I find hard to navigate, perhaps because of unfamiliarity).

Anywhere else? Zulip? I can't even find that, let alone tell if there are archived discussions.

The PEPs are on Github, has there been discussion there?

https://github.com/python/peps/blob/master/pep-8000.rst

-- Steve

On Nov 3, 2018, at 8:41 PM, Donald Stufft <donald@stufft.io> wrote:

As far as I am aware there is a topic per PEP on discourse that has had discussion mostly related to the specific PEP. I’m not aware of any general “weighing the options” topic on any discussion forum. I think so far it’s mostly just been people asking for refinements or changes to a specific PEP to make it more clear and/or more tolerable to that person.

Incase unfamiliarity with discourse is causing an issue in people finding the topics, and that’s what folks are stumbling with, here are links to each of the PEP specific topics:

• PEP 8010 - The Singular Leader - https://discuss.python.org/t/pep-8010-the-singular-leader/188 <https://discuss.python.org/t/pep-8010-the-singular-leader/188>
• PEP 8011 - Leadership by a Trio of Pythonistas - https://discuss.python.org/t/pep-8011-leadership-by-trio-of-pythonistas-top-... <https://discuss.python.org/t/pep-8011-leadership-by-trio-of-pythonistas-top-or-simply-trio/199>
• PEP 8012 - The Community Model - https://discuss.python.org/t/pep-8012-the-community-model/156 <https://discuss.python.org/t/pep-8012-the-community-model/156>
• PEP 8013 - The External Council Model - https://discuss.python.org/t/pep-8013-the-external-council-governance-model/... <https://discuss.python.org/t/pep-8013-the-external-council-governance-model/181>
• PEP 8014 - The Commons Model - https://discuss.python.org/t/pep-8014-the-commons-model/173 <https://discuss.python.org/t/pep-8014-the-commons-model/173>
• PEP 8015 - “Organization of the Python Community” - https://discuss.python.org/t/pep-8015-organization-of-the-python-community/1... <https://discuss.python.org/t/pep-8015-organization-of-the-python-community/193>

There is also a draft PEP, PEP 8016 - “The boringest possible steering committee model” - which is more of a proto-PEP at the moment, but discussion about it can be located at https://discuss.python.org/t/working-discussion-for-pep-8016-the-boringest-p... <https://discuss.python.org/t/working-discussion-for-pep-8016-the-boringest-possible-steering-council-model/333>.

Each thread seems to have somewhere between 30-50 total posts, so all in there’s maybe ~300 posts to read across all of them (and many of those posts are pretty short).

Le 04/11/2018 à 12:38, Paul Moore a écrit :

On Sun, 4 Nov 2018 at 00:21, Steven D'Aprano <steve@pearwood.info> wrote:

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But let's be fair to those who have put in the effort to make this work so far. "Disenfranchisement" is not even close to a fair criticism.

Frankly, I'm tired of being picked up on specifics of the wording I used. I felt that "disenfranchised" described how I feel pretty well. If you're saying that my understanding of the word is inaccurate, then fine, I'm happy you know better than me. But I explained my problem in more detail as well as stating the summary version - I can't find context or discussions, I don't have the time to become an expert in all the details[1] but conversely I can't find out what those who *have* investigated the details think, etc etc.

I don't think anyone here is an expert on the details. The discussion we're having is probably unusual for most or all people here.

That people like me may spend more time reading the PEPs doesn't actually make them more competent on the broader topic of governance systems. So feel free to judge the PEPs by yourself and don't be afraid of casting such judgement. You're as competent as anyone else. Ideally we would have started this discussion a lot of time in advance, and without any deadline looming over us, but the events decided otherwise.

Regards

Antoine.

On Sun, 4 Nov 2018 at 15:25, Steve Dower <steve.dower@python.org> wrote:

For example, right now, I'm leaning towards 8013, 8010, 8016, 8011, 8012, 8015, 8014. But since some are still in flux (particularly 8016), that could change. And my core rationale is basically how likely we are to be able to fill the roles created by the model.

As one example of my confusion here, https://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-8016/ is currently a 404. So where are you seeing something you can express a preference on? Presumably you're looking at the raw data in github?

I have limited time, and I feel like we were promised a deadline after which we could review what was being proposed, and discuss the proposals in a public forum. After that, there would be a vote. But at this point in time, I'm confused about:

1. When the proposals will be finalised and published.
2. Where the discussion(s) will be taking place.

PEP 8001 says that the vote will take place in the 2 weeks between 16 Nov and 30 Nov. PEP 8000 states that the following proposals exist:

PEP 8010 - The BDFL Governance Model PEP 8011 - Python Governance Model Lead by Trio of Pythonistas PEP 8012 - The Community Governance Model PEP 8013 - The External Governance Model PEP 8014 - The Commons Governance Model PEP 8015 - Organization of the Python community

but claims that 8010 and 8012 are placeholders - looking at the PEPs themselves, this seems to be untrue.

I'd like to spend some time reviewing the proposals and understanding the options we're being asked to vote on, but I do *not* want to waste time reviewing proposals that are still in flux. How do I know when I can do that? And where do I go to see what *other* people are saying about the relative merits of the proposals? The topics on Discourse seem to be limited to one proposal at a time - so I'm assuming they are thrashing out details (that I don't really care about - I don't have enough of a "high level" feel yet to want to get into that level of detail).

I guess I am assuming here that a topic titled "PEP 8013: The External Council Governance Model" is just about PEP 8013, and doesn't include digressions and off-topic subthreads (such as "this is why I prefer PEP xxx over PEP 8013"). I suppose I'm basing that on the fact that the Discourse users are making a point that one of the advantages of Discourse is that threads don't ramble like mailing lists do. In reality, I'm suspicious - it seems to me that human nature is such that discussions *do* digress, and go off topic. But again it's about time - if Discourse is just as much a bunch of wide ranging discussions as the mailing list is, I don't have time to follow all of Discourse as well as all of the lists I follow, and I don't have the time to learn how to manage and prioritise on Discourse (or at least, whatever time I do have that I could use for that, I'd rather use to better understand the governance proposals, as those are more important!) In the end, I accept that "I don't have enough time to do a good job" is something I have to accept and decide whether I abstain from the vote, or skim and vote as best I can based on that. That's something I can't expect help in deciding - but a little more clarity on what's happening with the process would make it a lot easier for me to make that decision myself.

Anyhow, this is probably a bit off-topic again. I don't know whether anyone thinks I'm offering anything new here - I feel like I'm explaining my concerns from another perspective, but maybe all that's coming across is me going on about the same things over and over. If so, I apologise. I'll do my best to assume that I've said my piece now, and if nothing gets better then I'm just going to have to deal with it, as my views have been heard and that's all I can expect.

Paul

On Sun, 4 Nov 2018 at 10:53, Paul Moore <p.f.moore@gmail.com> wrote:

On Sun, 4 Nov 2018 at 15:25, Steve Dower <steve.dower@python.org> wrote:

...

For example, right now, I'm leaning towards 8013, 8010, 8016, 8011, 8012, 8015, 8014. But since some are still in flux (particularly 8016), that could change. And my core rationale is basically how likely we are to be able to fill the roles created by the model.

As one example of my confusion here, https://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-8016/ is currently a 404. So where are you seeing something you can express a preference on? Presumably you're looking at the raw data in github?

I have limited time, and I feel like we were promised a deadline after which we could review what was being proposed, and discuss the proposals in a public forum. After that, there would be a vote. But at this point in time, I'm confused about:

1. When the proposals will be finalised and published.

We were hoping by now already, but unfortunately the voting discussion has gone on longer than I think anyone planned for.

2. Where the discussion(s) will be taking place.

Discourse and here.

PEP 8001 says that the vote will take place in the 2 weeks between 16 Nov and 30 Nov. PEP 8000 states that the following proposals exist:

PEP 8010 - The BDFL Governance Model PEP 8011 - Python Governance Model Lead by Trio of Pythonistas PEP 8012 - The Community Governance Model PEP 8013 - The External Governance Model PEP 8014 - The Commons Governance Model PEP 8015 - Organization of the Python community

but claims that 8010 and 8012 are placeholders - looking at the PEPs themselves, this seems to be untrue.

It's outdated. I think Barry just hasn't thought of updating it yet since it's just an index into the 801X PEPs which you can view in the PEP index directly without any special background info (I know I personally forgot that PEP 8000 even listed the various PEPs).

I'd like to spend some time reviewing the proposals and understanding the options we're being asked to vote on, but I do *not* want to waste time reviewing proposals that are still in flux. How do I know when I can do that?

I think the original point to this thread was to figure that out. My assumption is that if we don't change dates then all 801X PEPs will forcibly go into "final" status and not be updated short of spelling mistakes or clarifications that were simply overlooked -- i.e. no semantic changes -- on November 15.

And where do I go to see what *other* people are saying about the relative merits of the proposals? The topics on Discourse seem to be limited to one proposal at a time - so I'm assuming they are thrashing out details (that I don't really care about - I don't have enough of a "high level" feel yet to want to get into that level of detail).

Correct. No grand discussion has occurred as all the discussion has been around getting the various PEPs to a final state that the proposers were happy with.

I guess I am assuming here that a topic titled "PEP 8013: The External Council Governance Model" is just about PEP 8013, and doesn't include digressions and off-topic subthreads (such as "this is why I prefer PEP xxx over PEP 8013"). I suppose I'm basing that on the fact that the Discourse users are making a point that one of the advantages of Discourse is that threads don't ramble like mailing lists do. In reality, I'm suspicious - it seems to me that human nature is such that discussions *do* digress, and go off topic. But again it's about time - if Discourse is just as much a bunch of wide ranging discussions as the mailing list is, I don't have time to follow all of Discourse as well as all of the lists I follow, and I don't have the time to learn how to manage and prioritise on Discourse (or at least, whatever time I do have that I could use for that, I'd rather use to better understand the governance proposals, as those are more important!) In the end, I accept that "I don't have enough time to do a good job" is something I have to accept and decide whether I abstain from the vote, or skim and vote as best I can based on that. That's something I can't expect help in deciding - but a little more clarity on what's happening with the process would make it a lot easier for me to make that decision myself.

So far people have been good about keeping Discourse on-topic. There is also the benefit of being able to forcibly split a thread when it starts to go off-topic (versus what happened here when the thread went off-topic and the only way to stop that is to start a new email thread and hope people pick up on the fact that it split off).

Anyhow, this is probably a bit off-topic again.

Yes, but that's a drawback to mailing lists in my opinion and it's hard to avoid. :)

-Brett

I don't know whether anyone thinks I'm offering anything new here - I feel like I'm explaining my concerns from another perspective, but maybe all that's coming across is me going on about the same things over and over. If so, I apologise. I'll do my best to assume that I've said my piece now, and if nothing gets better then I'm just going to have to deal with it, as my views have been heard and that's all I can expect.

Paul

---

python-committers mailing list python-committers@python.org https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-committers Code of Conduct: https://www.python.org/psf/codeofconduct/

On Mon, 5 Nov 2018 at 19:11, Brett Cannon <brett@python.org> wrote:

...

Anyhow, this is probably a bit off-topic again.

Yes, but that's a drawback to mailing lists in my opinion and it's hard to avoid. :)

I did consider what I would have done on Discourse, and came to the conclusion that I would have done exactly the same - I've no idea how Discourse would help with a "here's some things I thought of that I felt needed saying while reading this thread" post. Obviously I could move the reply to a new topic, but I could just as easily have changed the subject in the mailing list. So without meaning to ignore your smiley, I don't think it's really a fault with mailing lists, just with how people discuss things ;-)

Paul

[Paul Moore <p.f.moore@gmail.com>]

I did consider what I would have done on Discourse, and came to the conclusion that I would have done exactly the same - I've no idea how Discourse would help with a "here's some things I thought of that I felt needed saying while reading this thread" post.

It wouldn't, and nobody would really care. It's when a technically off-topic sub-thread _grows_ that it becomes "a problem". Sometimes you just can't gauge interest in whether it will without making a start. If people pile on, the very lack of a fully-threaded view in Discourse is what _drives_ people to split it off to a new "category" of its own Which is a better outcome for everyone! If you do care about the new category, it has its own space wholly dedicated to it. If you don't care, don't follow it, and you'll never even know that it's still going on.

Obviously I could move the reply to a new topic, but I could just as easily have changed the subject in the mailing list.

But people don't. If this sub-thread keeps going on, someone eventually _will_ change the Subject line, and then you need "clever" software to show you that it's still the same sub-thread, and it keeps getting sent to everyone on the "python-committers" list whether they want it or not.

So without meaning to ignore your smiley, I don't think it's really a fault with mailing lists, just with how people discuss things ;-)

In the absence of trying it for yourself, you could, e.g., look for what the people who designed the system had in mind. The lack of a fully threaded view in Discourse was 100% intentional, not due to, e.g., laziness, or lack of time or skill.

Here's a start:

https://blog.codinghorror.com/web-discussions-flat-by-design/

I'm not necessarily endorsing those views, but I did take the time to try to find out _why_ they did what they did. It wasn't capricious. There are things I do and don't like about Discourse, but _which_ things are still changing for me over time ;-)

On Nov 5, 2018, at 2:29 PM, Paul Moore <p.f.moore@gmail.com> wrote:

Hmm, so voting opens immediately after the PEPs are finalised? No discussion/debate period before that? Maybe I misunderstood, I'd assumed that this would be more similar to an election process, with a period of canvassing support and/or debating the strengths and weaknesses of the proposals, leading up to a vote.

I don’t think there is anything stopping people from doing that right now (and honestly, right now seems like the *right* time to do that if it’s going to happen, so that the proposals can evolve based on any discussion that comes out of that). Waiting until the proposals are set in stone seems like a less useful implementation of that idea.

I suspect the reason that people aren’t doing that, is just nobody has started that discussion for one reason or another.

On Mon, 5 Nov 2018 at 11:29, Paul Moore <p.f.moore@gmail.com> wrote:

On Mon, 5 Nov 2018 at 19:11, Brett Cannon <brett@python.org> wrote:

...

...

I'd like to spend some time reviewing the proposals and understanding the options we're being asked to vote on, but I do *not* want to waste time reviewing proposals that are still in flux. How do I know when I can do that?

I think the original point to this thread was to figure that out. My assumption is that if we don't change dates then all 801X PEPs will forcibly go into "final" status and not be updated short of spelling mistakes or clarifications that were simply overlooked -- i.e. no semantic changes -- on November 15.

Hmm, so voting opens immediately after the PEPs are finalised? No discussion/debate period before that?

You get 2 weeks of that since the vote is open that long (as currently planned). I'm not sure if the UK has this, but think of it like voting by mail. People are still discussing stuff while you can mail in your vote, so if you aren't ready to cast your vote until the last day then you can wait while those of us who are ready Day 1 can vote early.

Maybe I misunderstood, I'd assumed that this would be more similar to an election process, with a period of canvassing support and/or debating the strengths and weaknesses of the proposals, leading up to a vote.

But there's also no election _day_ like you might be used to, but instead an election _pair of weeks_. Do you really want to have threads like this for more than two weeks anyway? ;)

OK. I can't say I *like* that, but if that's what's happening then that probably explains some of my confusion.

Hopefully the above explanation assuages your worries, otherwise I don't understand your worries.

I find it rather unusual that we are pushed to vote on PEPs which will just have been finished in writing tonight.

Shouldn't people who were not involved in the individual creation processes at least get two weeks to review the final work to make up their mind before entering a voting period ?

It seems like we're completely skipping the review phase of the regular PEP process and going straight from PEP writing to a vote:

https://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0001/#id38

which is odd given the importance of this decision and also odd compared to normal democratic procedures where laws are first crafted, then put through parliament for discussion and then decided upon after everyone has had a reasonable chance for review.

For the people who have been heavily involved in the PEP creations this may seem unnecessary, but this is just small subset of the core developers.

BTW: Thank you for writing up the comparison. I hope you have updated to the resp. final versions of the PEPs as well :-)

On 15.11.2018 13:08, Victor Stinner wrote:

Le sam. 3 nov. 2018 à 03:37, Victor Stinner <vstinner@redhat.com> a écrit :

...

According to the PEP 8001: "The vote will happen in a 2-week-long window from November 16 2018 to November 30 (Anywhere-on-Earth)." It's now in less than two weeks.

It seems like the vote is going to start tomorrow, but see discussions at:

• https://discuss.python.org/t/does-the-nov-16-nov-30-voting-timeframe-still-w...
• https://discuss.python.org/t/pep-801x-authors-are-you-on-track-for-the-vote-...

For the 3 core developers (on 95) who didn't fill their email address in the voters repository, please do so! (I sent you an email :-))

=> https://github.com/python/voters/issues/1

Note: This repository is private and will remain private, only accessible to core developers (to not leak your email addresses).

...

I see that the PEP 8001 is still being updated (voting method). Should we still expect new changes before the vote starts? Can we set a deadline, like November 15 (Anywhere-on-Earth)? (...) What is the deadline to submit new governance PEP and to update governance PEPs? November 15 (Anywhere-on-Earth)?

It seems like today is last day to update the 80xx PEPs (8 PEPs: 8001 and 8010..8016). Hurry up if you want to push a last minute change :-) (Obvious, it's ok if your PEP doesn't need changes anymore ;-))

--

Again, I share the link to my comparison of the 7 governance PEPs:

https://discuss.python.org/t/comparison-of-the-7-governance-peps/392

Please update it (any core dev can modify the first message, it's a wiki!) if my comparison is inaccurate/out of date. Or add a comment if you are not sure.

Obviously, only PEPs should be used to take your decision (vote). My comparison only exists to have a quick overview, but I expect that you all will ready all PEPs, right? :-D

Victor

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On Thu, 15 Nov 2018 at 05:09, Paul Moore <p.f.moore@gmail.com> wrote:

On Thu, 15 Nov 2018 at 12:55, M.-A. Lemburg <mal@egenix.com> wrote:

...

I find it rather unusual that we are pushed to vote on PEPs which will just have been finished in writing tonight.

Shouldn't people who were not involved in the individual creation processes at least get two weeks to review the final work to make up their mind before entering a voting period ?

That's probably the thing that bothers me most, as well. That and the fact that once I've cast my vote, I can't change it - so I really have to defer voting until the last minute, in case someone comes up with a compelling argument for one proposal that I hadn't thought of.

OK, so it seems you're unhappy that you only have a day to vote since you can't change your vote ...

I made a deliberate choice *not* to get involved in the discussions while the proposals were being prepared, because I find it far too easy to get an impression of a proposal from an early draft and then misjudge the proposal by not updating my views once it's updated. I don't want to do that with this decision, as it's pretty important (!) and so I've held off reading any of the proposals until they are announced as final. And yet, it looks like once they are announced, there's a possibility that people will start voting and then excuse themselves from discussion (because once you've voted, there's no point discussing any further). I can read them, but may not have anyone to discuss them with once I've done so... That doesn't sound like an ideal way of reaching consensus.

... but then you don't like that people can vote over two weeks because you don't want discussions to occur while people can vote to force them to participate in discussions? I might be missing something, but these two issues seem contradictory, especially since we can't exactly force people to not talk about this while voting is open. :)

[I'm going to reply to MAL here as well which is a bit awkward, but it would have been smoother on Discourse ;) ]

It seems like we're completely skipping the review phase of the regular PEP process and going straight from PEP writing to a vote:

https://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0001/#id38

which is odd given the importance of this decision and also odd compared to normal democratic procedures where laws are first crafted, then put through parliament for discussion and then decided upon after everyone has had a reasonable chance for review.

I don't know if it's really fair to say the review phase is being skipped. It's not like anyone *must* vote tomorrow and so there really isn't any time to think things over. You still have the rest of the month to review the PEPs and place your vote. It's no different than someone following a PEP closely, forming their opinion along the way, and then when the final version lands replying with an opinion immediately even if the PEP delegate isn't making a final decision for another two weeks.

Having said all that, it's not like the decision making process will be changed at this point, so I think that we're going to have to accept it, flaws and all, as it stands.

It's totally flawed because we all can't agree on anything. :) For example, remember that the voting was going to allow people to change their vote initially in the first version of PEP 8001, but more people wanted the vote to be private than have the ability to change their vote, so the compromise was swapped for preferring privacy.

And as for the two week voting time, that was discussed and generally agreed to way back when the initial timelines were discussed in August and I believe again in September (both here and at the dev sprints). And people specifically wanted more than a week to be able to vote, so it was deliberate to have the voting open for as long as it is (actually if I remember correctly a proposal for voting time was to be from when PEPs finalized until the end of November, which would have put it at about six weeks).

On Thu, 15 Nov 2018 at 18:55, Brett Cannon <brett@python.org> wrote:

OK, so it seems you're unhappy that you only have a day to vote since you can't change your vote ... [...] ... but then you don't like that people can vote over two weeks because you don't want discussions to occur while people can vote to force them to participate in discussions? I might be missing something, but these two issues seem contradictory, especially since we can't exactly force people to not talk about this while voting is open. :)

No, I'm uncomfortable with the discussion period overlapping the voting period, because the fact that you can't change your vote means that once someone votes, there's no incentive to continue discussing. But I accept that it's how it's going to be, I'm not arguing for any change here at this late stage.

Paul

Le jeu. 15 nov. 2018 à 13:55, M.-A. Lemburg <mal@egenix.com> a écrit :

I find it rather unusual that we are pushed to vote on PEPs which will just have been finished in writing tonight.

Well, denying to modify PEPs during the PEP is the only reliable solution to prevent PEP authors to modify their PEP :-)

IMHO latest changes (that I saw) in the governance PEPs are "minor", they don't change fundamentally the governance model.

Shouldn't people who were not involved in the individual creation processes at least get two weeks to review the final work to make up their mind before entering a voting period ?

Two weeks is the duration of the vote. It isn't enough to review PEPs? Most PEPs have been written one month ago, if not longer.

For the people who have been heavily involved in the PEP creations this may seem unnecessary, but this is just small subset of the core developers.

I guess that many people will not start reading the governance PEPs until they really have to :-) I'm not sure that postpone the vote would help.

BTW: Thank you for writing up the comparison. I hope you have updated to the resp. final versions of the PEPs as well :-)

You're welcome. Yes, I already updated everything :-) Hopefully, other PEP authors are also keeping this comparison up to date!

Victor

Based on my suggestion on Discourse, I propose that the period between tomorrow and November 30th be an official PEP review period, with voting postponed to December 1 - 16 AOE 2018.

https://github.com/python/peps/pull/841

I am personally going to start reviewing these PEPs after the flood of trypophan is unleashed into my bloodstream following the USA Thanksgiving meal.

-Barry