Brett C. wrote:
All valid points, but I also don't want people to suddenly start posting one-liners or bug posts.
I agree that keeping the noise level low is desirable; I hope this will come out naturally when we start commenting on high-noise remarks. For example, I would have no problems telling somebody who says "me too" on a feature request that he should go away and come back with an implementation of the requested feature. I would still apply the "standard" conventions of python-dev: that you should be fairly knowledgable about the things you are talking about before posting.
I guess it comes down to a signal-to-noise ratio and if the level of signal we are currently getting will hold. If we say it is okay for people to send in patch reviews *only* and not notifications of new patches, bug reports, or bug reviews, then I can handle it.
People do tend to notify about patches from time to time, especially when they are committers, and want to weigh in their reputation to advance peer review of the proposed changes. Other people who notify about new patches they made will continue to get my "5 for 1" offer which actually triggered this new interest in contributing-by-reviewing. Another reason not to post patches to python-dev is message size for modem users although I'm doubtful how valid this rationale is these days, given ADSL, spam, HTML mails, and everything...
And neither do I. I just don't want a ton of random emails on python-dev that really belong in the SF tracker instead. Reason why we don't tend to take direct bug reports in email unless there is a question over semantics.
I certainly don't want to see random comments on python-dev, either (and I do see random comments come in bursts, and have to choose to ignore entire threads because of that. I don't have to write python-dev summaries, though :-) I disagree with the primary reason not to take bug reports on python-dev, however: bug reports in email get lost if not immediately processed; usage of a tracker is necessary to actually "keep track". So this kind of bug management is the primary reason for the tracker, not that we want to keep random users out of python-dev (although this is a convenient side effect). Regards, Martin