On 15/07/2022 16:09, Rob Boehne via Python-Dev wrote:

100% agree – dealing with 5 or more platforms for discussion groups is a nightmare, and I tend not to follow any of them as closely for that reason.

I agree. I don't mind having to use Discourse if I want to take part in a discussion but 99% of the time I just want to keep up to date with what is going on. In that case I want the information to come to me - I don't want to have to hunt for it. Can there be an RSS feed for everything, not just PEPs? Phil

From: Skip Montanaro <skip.montanaro@gmail.com> Date: Friday, July 15, 2022 at 9:26 AM To: Petr Viktorin <encukou@gmail.com> Cc: python-dev@python.org <python-dev@python.org> Subject: [SPAM] [Python-Dev] Re: Switching to Discourse The discuss.python.org<https://nam12.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=http%3A%2F%2Fdiscuss.python.org%2F&data=05%7C01%7Crobb%40datalogics.com%7C241da9f510764bf2ba8608da666df61c%7Cfc3d8cdfd6994f23ae232659c3da4749%7C0%7C1%7C637934919720701261%7CUnknown%7CTWFpbGZsb3d8eyJWIjoiMC4wLjAwMDAiLCJQIjoiV2luMzIiLCJBTiI6Ik1haWwiLCJXVCI6Mn0%3D%7C2000%7C%7C%7C&sdata=DThYDKE32GfsdNG9hlvthdjnl%2B%2BmnvPUj3lM9SnsjbE%3D&reserved=0> experiment has been going on for quite a while, and while the platform is not without its issues, we consider it a success. The Core Development category is busier than python-dev. According to staff, discuss.python.org<https://nam12.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=http%3A%2F%2Fdiscuss.python.org%2F&data=05%7C01%7Crobb%40datalogics.com%7C241da9f510764bf2ba8608da666df61c%7Cfc3d8cdfd6994f23ae232659c3da4749%7C0%7C1%7C637934919720701261%7CUnknown%7CTWFpbGZsb3d8eyJWIjoiMC4wLjAwMDAiLCJQIjoiV2luMzIiLCJBTiI6Ik1haWwiLCJXVCI6Mn0%3D%7C2000%7C%7C%7C&sdata=DThYDKE32GfsdNG9hlvthdjnl%2B%2BmnvPUj3lM9SnsjbE%3D&reserved=0> is much easier to moderate.. If you're following python-dev but not discuss.python.org<https://nam12.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=http%3A%2F%2Fdiscuss.python.org%2F&data=05%7C01%7Crobb%40datalogics.com%7C241da9f510764bf2ba8608da666df61c%7Cfc3d8cdfd6994f23ae232659c3da4749%7C0%7C1%7C637934919720701261%7CUnknown%7CTWFpbGZsb3d8eyJWIjoiMC4wLjAwMDAiLCJQIjoiV2luMzIiLCJBTiI6Ik1haWwiLCJXVCI6Mn0%3D%7C2000%7C%7C%7C&sdata=DThYDKE32GfsdNG9hlvthdjnl%2B%2BmnvPUj3lM9SnsjbE%3D&reserved=0>, you're missing out.

Personally, I think you are focused too narrowly and aren't seeing the forest for the trees. Email protocols were long ago standardized. As a result, people can use any of a large number of applications to read and organize their email. To my knowledge, there is no standardization amongst the various forum tools out there. I'm not suggesting discuss is necessarily better or worse than other (often not open source) forum tools, but each one implements its own walled garden. I'm referring more broadly than just Python, or even Python development, though even within the Python community it's now difficult to manage/monitor all the various discussion sources (email, discuss, GitHub, Stack Overflow, ...)

Get off my lawn! ;-)

Skip, kinda glad he's retired now...

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Le 15/07/2022 à 17:52, Petr Viktorin a écrit :

For everything on Discourse, the RSS feed is at https://discuss.python.org/latest.rss For a specific categoriy/topic, append .rss to the Web URL.

Hello, thanks for the useful information. However, I just tried it and I can only read the first message of each thread. Then I have to "Read full topic" through the nightmarish web interface with its nag screens. Is there a way to access all posts through the mail/RSS client, preferably with a threaded view? Cheers, Baptiste

On Fri, Jul 15, 2022 at 9:33 AM Skip Montanaro <skip.montanaro@gmail.com> wrote:

Email protocols were long ago standardized. As a result, people can use any of a large number of applications to read and organize their email. To my knowledge, there is no standardization amongst the various forum tools out there.

While I understand and somewhat agree with you, Skip, there is a "hidden" feature of Discourse that does make it a little easier to track many different forums: You can add ".rss" to various URLs and get an RSS feed for that topic/channel/etc. e.g. the WebAssembly group is: https://discuss.python.org/c/webassembly/28 And its corresponding RSS feed is: https://discuss.python.org/c/webassembly/28.rss Cheers, Peter

On 7/15/22 08:37, Petr Viktorin wrote:

And that's exactly why I consume Discourse in mailing list mode, with client-side filtering in Thunderbird.

How do you handle threading? I follow each (sub)thread through to it's end, as it keeps a logical flow, but Discourse has everything linear which means that as I read it the conversation keeps jumping around, making it hard to follow. -- ~Ethan~

On 15Jul2022 11:59, Ethan Furman <ethan@stoneleaf.us> wrote:

On 7/15/22 08:37, Petr Viktorin wrote:

...

And that's exactly why I consume Discourse in mailing list mode, with client-side filtering in Thunderbird.

How do you handle threading? I follow each (sub)thread through to it's end, as it keeps a logical flow, but Discourse has everything linear which means that as I read it the conversation keeps jumping around, making it hard to follow.

I use discourse in mailing list mode. It only looks unthreaded :-) What actually happens is that it has its own message-ids and mangles things, and treats some headers differently. Eg if I post to discourse, the copy of the message which comes to me from discourse has a discourse generated message-id, not my original message-id. I did a bit of digging here: https://discuss.python.org/t/why-is-the-result-after-this-function-is-called... but have not got to submitting a bug report. Cheers, Cameron Simpson <cs@cskk.id.au>

I don't think I *can* do much more than accept it and move on: *if python-dev was used by everyone*, rather than almost exclusively by people who prefer e-mail (and presumably use threading mail clients), we'd get mangled threading anyway from all the non-threaded clients.

Don't forget that used to be the case. ;-) Skip

Threading on the Python Discourse should now be working correctly. This is the good work of Martin Brennan: https://meta.discourse.org/u/martin

I’m not sure what “working correctly” means. Do you have some examples on discuss.python.org where threading is used? Is this something that previous discussions get for free or only new replies? I’m not finding much information about this feature on the Discourse site. -Barry

Oh, I see, thanks. This is for the email interface, not the web interface. -Barry

On Sep 27, 2022, at 13:49, Cameron Simpson <cs@cskk.id.au> wrote:

On 27Sep2022 11:14, Barry Warsaw <barry@python.org> wrote:

...

...

Threading on the Python Discourse should now be working correctly. This is the good work of Martin Brennan: https://meta.discourse.org/u/martin

I’m not sure what “working correctly” means. Do you have some examples on discuss.python.org where threading is used? Is this something that previous discussions get for free or only new replies? I’m not finding much information about this feature on the Discourse site.

The email side of Discourse now correctly sets the In-Reply-To and References headers, so that the email side discussions no longer appear "flat" and threads can be read in order. Example View of a recent thread from my mailer:

28Sep2022 01:58 Stone Zhong via N ┌> discuss-ideas 5.7K 27Sep2022 19:21 Serhiy Storchak N │┌> discuss-ideas 6.1K 27Sep2022 19:16 Václav Brožík v N ├> discuss-ideas 7.2K 27Sep2022 18:57 Serhiy Storchak N ┌> discuss-ideas 6.1K 27Sep2022 17:07 Stone Zhong via N [Py] [Ideas] Improve dqeue discuss-ideas 7.5K

(I sort my email a bit backwards.) This would have been a flat nontopologically ordered grouping a few days ago.

Cheers, Cameron Simpson <cs@cskk.id.au>

On Fri, Jul 15, 2022 at 12:15 PM Barry Warsaw <barry@python.org> wrote:

I agree that the experiment has proven successful enough that there’s more value at this point in consolidating discussions.

We've only been running this experiment since 2017(?) so maybe it's too soon to say it's a success? <wink> -eric

On 15. 07. 22 21:13, Joannah Nanjekye wrote:

I am -1 for leaving email due to the long history of standardization, for a platform whose future I don't know about.

When you say core development is busier, does that mean the experiment with python-dev failed? aka wasn't a success, if so why are we moving python-dev too if it's not working well? I stand to be corrected obviously.

I'm sorry, I don't understand what you meant here. The "experiment" was introducing Discourse (discuss.python.org) to see if people would like it. It looks like they do, since the Core Development category on Discourse is more active than this mailing list (python-dev).

On Fri., Jul. 15, 2022, 2:22 p.m. Petr Viktorin, <encukou@gmail.com <mailto:encukou@gmail.com>> wrote:

Hello, Currently development discussions are split between multiple communication channels, for example: - python-dev and discuss.python.org <http://discuss.python.org> for design discussions, - GitHub Issues and Pull Requests for specific changes, - IRC, Discord and private chats for real-time discussions, - Topic-specific channels like typing-sig.

While most of these serve different needs, there is too much overlap between python-dev and discuss.python.org <http://discuss.python.org>. It seems that for most people, this situation is worse than sticking to either one platform – even if we don't go with that person's favorite.

The discuss.python.org <http://discuss.python.org> experiment has been going on for quite a while, and while the platform is not without its issues, we consider it a success. The Core Development category is busier than python-dev. According to staff, discuss.python.org <http://discuss.python.org> is much easier to moderate.. If you're following python-dev but not discuss.python.org <http://discuss.python.org>, you're missing out.

The Steering Council would like to switch from python-dev to discuss.python.org <http://discuss.python.org>. Practically, this means: - Moving the required PEP announcements to discuss.python.org <http://discuss.python.org> - Moving discuss.python.org <http://discuss.python.org> up in the devguide communications page (https://devguide.python.org/communication/ <https://devguide.python.org/communication/>) - And that's it?

I imagine that the mailing list will stay around for continuing past discussion threads and for announcements, eventually switching to auto-reject incoming messages with a pointer to discuss.python.org <http://discuss.python.org>.

To be clear, discuss.python.org <http://discuss.python.org> allows editing posts, which is frankly handy for typos and clarifications. Editing alone should not be used for adding new info -- we should cultivate a culture of being friendly to mail users & notification watchers. This probably bears repeating in a few places.

We're aware not everyone wants to use the discuss.python.org <http://discuss.python.org> website, but there are some ways to avoid it:

- For new PEPs, you can point your RSS client to https://www.python.org/dev/peps/peps.rss <https://www.python.org/dev/peps/peps.rss> – it's not e-mail, but many email clients have RSS support. You can also watch the Steering Council issues on GitHub (https://github.com/python/steering-council/issues/ <https://github.com/python/steering-council/issues/>) for important questions and discussions.

- You can use discuss.python.org <http://discuss.python.org>'s “mailing list mode” (which subscribes you to all new posts), possibly with filtering and/or categorizing messages locally.

However, we would like to know if this will pose an undue burden to anyone, if there are workflows or usage problems that we are not aware of. As mentioned, this is something the Steering Council thinks is a good idea, but we want to make sure we're aware of all the impact when we make the final decision.

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On 18Jul2022 16:53, Joannah Nanjekye <nanjekyejoannah@gmail.com> wrote:

I see I might have misunderstood, thinking a python-dev channel on discuss was not as active as the mailing list. Understood.

My original stand on preferring email stands though due to stable standards.

Several of us use the email mode in Discourse. It works quite well. For me, both python-dev and the PDO posts land in my "python" local folder. Cheers, Cameron Simpson <cs@cskk.id.au>

On Wed, Jul 20, 2022 at 05:43:26PM -0700, Ethan Furman wrote:

It works, but I wouldn't say "quite well" -- any thread from discourse is one long linear series of replies, and reading them in chronological order means jumping around and trying to figure what is a reply to what.

Sometimes, seemingly at random, Discourse will not email the first message in a thread. No, it's not in my spam filter, I've checked. In my experience, Discourse doesn't cope well with email replies that use hard line breaks, breaking each line into its own paragraph -- but only sometimes. Discourse seems to insert blank lines between paragraphs in messages sent by email, even in code blocks -- but only sometimes. Even when it does't insert blank lines, Discourse seems to insert extra carriage returns (^M) at the end of lines in messages it sends -- but only sometimes. Discourse seems to treat a row of hyphens (what should be a markdown hrule) as the end of the post, and delete the hyphens and everything after it -- but only sometimes. Once, I've had Discourse seemingly randomly delete one line in the middle of a code block for no apparent reason. The bottom line is that Discourse's email works, but with a seemingly never-ending parade of annoyances and frustrations. -- Steve

On 16. 07. 22 8:48, Miro Hrončok wrote:

On 15. 07. 22 13:18, Petr Viktorin wrote:

...

- You can use discuss.python.org's “mailing list mode” (which subscribes you to all new posts), possibly with filtering and/or categorizing messages locally.

Hello Petr,

I suppose this might be the preferred way for the old farts like me who prefer mailing lists over a never-ending list of specific websites for each specific thing we are participating in.

What would be a good resource to read about this - where do I learn how to use discuss.python.org's in the “mailing list mode”

Is this note enough? https://devguide.python.org/developer-workflow/communication-channels/?highl...

or what's the easiest way to filter incoming mail into directories based on discuss.python.org categories,

Tags at the start of the Subject line work pretty well (though they can change occasionally).

how do I handle answers/threads,

and finally, how to make this approach effective?

That depends on what's effective for you, I'm afraid. I read/skim everything (except Users), so I might not need as much filtering as you. In my experience, marking/muting a thread works about as well as for regular e-mail threads -- the linearity is suboptimal, but not that bad.

Note that I am capable of googling some of this stuff, but I am preferably looking for your personal tips, as I always assumed you are a mail person, like I am. If you prefer to use the RSS feeds, I am interested in tips there as well.

I don't use RSS feeds.

On 7/21/22 6:42 PM, Steven Barker wrote:

Ideally there would be a way to subscribe only to the things I care about. Maybe that exists, but it's buried in menus I don't understand (or which mailing list mode overrides).

Mailing list mode is not what you want.  Instead, turn mailing list mode off and set your email settings to these: You can adjust the categories you receive email notifications for by changing your list of watched categories under the notification settings:

I feel similarly as Steven. I'm even less important to the development of CPython than he is. But like him, switching to Discourse means I simply won't try to follow development. Mailing list are friendly and easily manageable. In the small amount I've used Discourse, it feels unwieldy and less friendly. More importantly, it makes it "that other thing I have to go check." Email is something I will automatically examine every day. But again, I'm not the audience who matters, which I well recognize. On Thu, Jul 21, 2022, 6:50 PM Steven Barker <blckknght@gmail.com> wrote:

On Mon, Jul 18, 2022 at 6:28 AM Petr Viktorin <encukou@gmail.com> wrote:

...

On 16. 07. 22 8:48, Miro Hrončok wrote:

...

On 15. 07. 22 13:18, Petr Viktorin wrote:

...

- You can use discuss.python.org's “mailing list mode” (which subscribes you to all new posts), possibly with filtering and/or categorizing messages locally.

[...]

...

...

What would be a good resource to read about this - where do I learn how to use discuss.python.org's in the “mailing list mode”

Is this note enough?

https://devguide.python.org/developer-workflow/communication-channels/?highl...

[...]

So last night I tried activating mailing list mode, and I'm not remotely satisfied with the experience so far. Where mailing lists are concerned, I'm *only *subscribed to python-dev. Not python-users, not -ideas, not -packaging (if that's still a thing). But Discourse's mailing list mode sends me messages for all of those things in such a volume that it drowns out any discussions on topics that would have shown up on python-dev (I think one PEP discussion message came in overnight, compared to 20+ posts on other tags). After the first two -users messages came in almost immediately, I tried telling discourse to mute the tags I don't care about, but it seems not to work at all. The page with the mailing list mode toggle warns that it overrides other email settings, so I think I just get everything regardless of other settings.

If my only option is to be subscribed to a firehose of stuff I don't care about, I'm going to disable mailing list mode and if python-dev dies, I'll pretty much quit following Python's development. Now, I'm not a very important Python developer, I'm not a core dev, and my contributions are a few bug reports and a few patches over many years. But if there's no way to lurk on a modest-volume mailing list and contribute only occasionally, you're not going to get nearly as many people paying attention. I'm sure I could set up a whole suite of filters on my own end (e.g. discard any email with a subject starting with "[py] [Users]"), but that's an absurd and unnecessary burden, and it will only get worse the more categories you add to discourse (and I think the ease of adding categories is supposed to be a *feature*). This plan is going to drive developers like me away.

For discourse mailing list mode to be a reasonable substitute for python-dev, it needs filtering on the sending end to work. Ideally there would be a way to subscribe only to the things I care about. Maybe that exists, but it's buried in menus I don't understand (or which mailing list mode overrides).

Rather than comparing the number of posters on discourse vs python-dev, have we compared stats for how many people receive the messages?

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On 21Jul2022 15:42, Steven Barker <blckknght@gmail.com> wrote:

So last night I tried activating mailing list mode, and I'm not remotely satisfied with the experience so far. Where mailing lists are concerned, I'm *only *subscribed to python-dev. Not python-users, not -ideas, not -packaging (if that's still a thing). But Discourse's mailing list mode sends me messages for all of those things in such a volume that it drowns out any discussions on topics that would have shown up on python-dev (I think one PEP discussion message came in overnight, compared to 20+ posts on other tags). After the first two -users messages came in almost immediately, I tried telling discourse to mute the tags I don't care about, but it seems not to work at all. The page with the mailing list mode toggle warns that it overrides other email settings, so I think I just get everything regardless of other settings.

Aye. I jointed meta.discourse.org yesterday to submit a bug report about the threading (which they acknowledge is a regession) and this morning I turned off mailing list mode. So: - I still use mailing list mode for discuss.python.org; I'm abstractly interested in everything, and I have an aggressive email filtering system - I'm not using email mode for meta.discourse.org; Gah!!!! However: mailing list mode _is_ the firehose (minus muted topics and categories - nb not tags). With it off you can elect to receive messages as email for several things: - when you're sent a personal message (always/when away/never) - when quoted, replied to, @ed or new activity in watched categories, tags, topics (always/when away/never) - there's an option for an activity summary (I set it to "weekly" for meta.discourse.org) So what you could do is watch the "Dev" category if you want the equivalent of just python-dev. I'm going to see how it plays out, but I expect that will let me get a tightly limited email feed which I can treat like any other email list.

If my only option is to be subscribed to a firehose of stuff I don't care about, I'm going to disable mailing list mode and if python-dev dies, I'll pretty much quit following Python's development.

As mentioned, mailing list mode seems to be the firehose. The other "Emails" settings seem reasonably versatile to me on the face of it. Cheers, Cameron Simpson <cs@cskk.id.au>

On 21Jul2022 17:46, Christopher Barker <pythonchb@gmail.com> wrote:

OT: Does anyone else find it very odd to call a communication system “discord”?

I think it is a refreshing level of honesty about what live chat is like. As in "discordant". Cheers, Cameron Simpson <cs@cskk.id.au>

On 7/21/2022 8:46 PM, Christopher Barker wrote:

OT:

Does anyone else find it very odd to call a communication system “discord”?

For games, most of which involve combat, it seems appropriate. For CPython development, 'harmony' might be better. -- Terry Jan Reedy

On Thu, Jul 21, 2022 at 3:42 PM Steven Barker <blckknght@gmail.com> wrote:

So last night I tried activating mailing list mode [...]

To follow up on my own post, here's an update. I figured out that I'd done something incorrectly the first time I tried muting certain categories of posts on Discourse. I think I just failed to save my choices in the settings screen, and I got it right the second time I tried. The firehose was tamed to a reasonable rate of flow. I do still think that experience is much worse than signing up for just the python-dev mailing list. While excluding the Users (now Python Help), Ideas and Packaging categories has cut out most of the stuff I don't care about, there are a lot of low-volume categories that I probably don't care about either, but I don't know enough about them to tell. I'd rather be able to opt-in to categories I want instead of opting out to everything I don't want. I have low confidence in my understanding of Discourse settings, but I don't currently believe that setting a category as Watched does the same thing as mailing list mode, for that category only, but I could be wrong (I've not tried it). I don't want summary emails, and that seems to be the only thing on offer. And there isn't a generalized Dev category that covers the range of topics that the python-dev mailing list does. So to give my final takeaway: It might be possible for Discourse to replace Python-dev, even for those who wish to get their messages by email. But the user experience of signing up is vastly worse, and will need much more than a single paragraph in the dev-guide for most people to have a satisfying experience with mailing list mode (or some other mode that I don't yet know how to use).

On Mon, Jul 18, 2022 at 11:48 AM <h.vetinari@gmx.com> wrote:

LLVM did the same recently (though they imported all previous messages from the mailinglist, thus making them searchable in discourse) [2 - announcement; 3 - retro], and by and large, I think it was a success.

One of the comments in the retro was:

...

Searching the archives is much easier and have found me many old threads that I probably would have problem finding before since I haven’t been subscribed for that long.

I that it would be worth considering importing the mailing list into a separate discourse category that's then archived, but at least searchable. This would also lower the hurdle of new(er) contributors to investigate previous discussion on a given topic.

+1 -eric

Le 21/07/2022 à 07:59, Stefan Behnel a écrit :

I'm actually reading python-dev, c.l.py etc. through Gmane, and have done that ever since I joined. Simply because it's a mailing list of which I don't need a local (content) copy, and wouldn't want one. Gmane seems to have a complete archive that's searchable, regardless of "when I subscribed".

It's really sad that Discourse lacks an NNTP interface. […]

+1000 For this switch to accommodate all use cases, Discourse really needs a "lurking" story. That's lacking right now, possibly by design (Discourse developers are quite opinionated*, and anonymous reading seemingly doesn't fit their worldview). Maybe they can be convinced, though… By the way, I'm still trying the RSS way, but it doesn't seem to fit the bill (lack of a stream of posts per category). Cheers, Baptiste *not meant as a criticism: opinionated is good; it just makes it more difficult to provide the main communication channel of a wide and diverse community.

On Thu, Jul 21, 2022 at 12:19 AM Stefan Behnel <stefan_ml@behnel.de> wrote:

I'm actually reading python-dev, c.l.py etc. through Gmane, and have done that ever since I joined. Simply because it's a mailing list of which I don't need a local (content) copy, and wouldn't want one. Gmane seems to have a complete archive that's searchable, regardless of "when I subscribed".

+1

It's really sad that Discourse lacks an NNTP interface. There's an unmaintained bridge to NNTP servers [1], but not an emulating interface that would serve the available discussions via NNTP messages, so that users can get them into their NNTP/Mail clients to read them in proper discussion threads. I think adding that next to the existing web interface would serve everyone's needs just perfectly.

Perhaps the possible mirroring-to-mailman that Steve (Turnbull) mentioned would be enough to facilitate a continuity for NNTP? -eric

On Fri, 22 Jul 2022 at 03:07, Skip Montanaro <skip.montanaro@gmail.com> wrote:

I have a perhaps stupid question. Is Discord the same as discuss.python.org, just by another name? I find the similarity in names a bit confusing.

No, Discord is a different thing; it does text and voice communication channels in real-time. If you're familiar with Slack, it's broadly similar in purpose. ChrisA

On Fri, 22 Jul 2022 at 03:17, Skip Montanaro <skip.montanaro@gmail.com> wrote:

...

No, Discord is a different thing; it does text and voice communication channels in real-time. If you're familiar with Slack, it's broadly similar in purpose.

Thanks (and to the others who replied). It seems like they've tried to make it a game, giving me the "opportunity" to buy boosts (or whatever). What's up with that?

Everything's gotta be funded somehow. ChrisA

On Thu, Jul 21, 2022 at 10:34 AM Skip Montanaro <skip.montanaro@gmail.com> wrote:

...

No, Discord is a different thing; it does text and voice communication channels in real-time. If you're familiar with Slack, it's broadly similar in purpose.

Thanks (and to the others who replied).

FYI this multiple responses issue doesn't come up on Discourse because the replies are shown in real-time (as is the "Skip is typing ..." at the bottom).

It seems like they've tried to make it a game, giving me the "opportunity" to buy boosts (or whatever). What's up with that?

It's for "funding" a Discord server and how Discord makes money (otherwise the service is free).

Do we really need yet another place full of overlapping discussion channels?

Discord isn't overlapping with Discourse. Think of Discord as replacing IRC while also providing audio chat (and other things). For instance, people who were working together to squash release blockers for b4 were chatting live on Discord.

Hi, no I think "discord" refers to https://discord.com/ If discord is not finalised, we might also consider https://zulip.com/ which rust uses <https://rust-lang.zulipchat.com/> and would (based on a very quick look) appear to be more appropriate for python development's use case? Samuel -- Samuel Colvin On Thu, 21 Jul 2022 at 18:06, Skip Montanaro <skip.montanaro@gmail.com> wrote:

I have a perhaps stupid question. Is Discord the same as discuss.python.org, just by another name? I find the similarity in names a bit confusing.

Skip _______________________________________________ Python-Dev mailing list -- python-dev@python.org To unsubscribe send an email to python-dev-leave@python.org https://mail.python.org/mailman3/lists/python-dev.python.org/ Message archived at https://mail.python.org/archives/list/python-dev@python.org/message/B3WC35H3... Code of Conduct: http://python.org/psf/codeofconduct/

On Thu, Jul 21, 2022 at 10:05 AM Skip Montanaro <skip.montanaro@gmail.com> wrote:

I have a perhaps stupid question. Is Discord the same as discuss.python.org, just by another name? I find the similarity in names a bit confusing.

It's not the same. discuss.python.org is an instance of Discourse. Discord is something completely something else. Indeed the similarity is confusing.

On 21/07/2022 18:53, Mats Wichmann wrote:

On 7/21/22 11:11, Mariatta wrote:

...

On Thu, Jul 21, 2022 at 10:05 AM Skip Montanaro <skip.montanaro@gmail.com <mailto:skip.montanaro@gmail.com>> wrote:

I have a perhaps stupid question. Is Discord the same as discuss.python.org <http://discuss.python.org>, just by another name? I find the similarity in names a bit confusing.

It's not the same. discuss.python.org <http://discuss.python.org> is an instance of Discourse.

Discord is something completely something else.  Indeed the similarity is confusing.

As the wag said,

"These are only two hard things in computer science, cache invalidation and naming things".

Another wag said: There are only two hard things in computer science: cache invalidation, naming things, and off-by-one errors.

Add in IP lawyers and I think naming may have advanced to being the hardest.

On 21Jul2022 10:29, Stephen J. Turnbull <stephenjturnbull@gmail.com> wrote:

As long as Discourse provides the In-Reply-To header field, the current threading algorithm would work reasonably well.

Discourse does not do `In-Reply-To:` very well at all. Here's some headers from the _second_ post in the "Core dev sprint this year" thread: Message-ID: <topic/17208/60568.898edf234f56cf6f3a661c1a@discuss.python.org> In-Reply-To: <topic/17208@discuss.python.org> References: <topic/17208@discuss.python.org> The first post has this: Message-ID: <topic/17208.dc83577b18fc3ecc438ed42a@discuss.python.org> References: <topic/17208@discuss.python.org> So at present Discourse's email implementation is buggy. I need to submit a bug report. In essense: The `References` and `In-Reply-To` headers cite a _nonexistent_ message-id which just denotes the thread number in the web forum. By contrast, the message-id itself at least is nice and unique. _However_, someone participating in "email mode" will of course send a message with its own distinct message-id from their source system, and that does not survive the email->discourse->email-out process. So your local copy of the message, if you keep one (I do) it will be a distinct duplicate message in your mail folder. I don't expect that to change. Anyway: - Discourse does provide `In-Reply-To` and `References` - they're bogus - they can be fixed (I'll submit a bug report, someone told me how to do that...) Cheers, Cameron Simpson <cs@cskk.id.au>

On 21Jul2022 13:25, Stephen J. Turnbull <stephenjturnbull@gmail.com> wrote:

Cameron Simpson writes:

...

Discourse does not do `In-Reply-To:` very well at all. Here's some headers from the _second_ post in the "Core dev sprint this year" thread:

Message-ID: <topic/17208/60568.898edf234f56cf6f3a661c1a@discuss.python.org> In-Reply-To: <topic/17208@discuss.python.org> References: <topic/17208@discuss.python.org>

I'm tempted to write something uncivil, but instead I'm gonna go hug a puppy and weep.

...

So at present Discourse's email implementation is buggy. I need to submit a bug report.

Thank you!

Bug report: https://meta.discourse.org/t/discourse-email-messages-are-incorrectly-thread...

You may find it useful to cite RFC 5322, section 3.6.4, and emphasize "unique" while mentioning the algorithm for populating References and In-Reply-To presented there.

I've pointed them at it. I didn't belabor the id generation since their ids seem ok. It's the referencing header which are broken.

...

_However_, someone participating in "email mode" will of course send a message with its own distinct message-id from their source system, and that does not survive the email->discourse->email-out process. [...] I don't expect that to change.

That's just plain obnoxious. Anybody who's in the CCs who participates in "email mode" will get (practically speaking) unfilterable duplicates, and (if there is offline discussion) a bogus new thread.

Well, I think a number of mailing lists startyed do this to support DKIM or DMARC or something, otherwise their message would amount to a forgery if what they received. Never dug into it much. It's annoying, but not nearly as annoying as broken threading.

I wonder if this goes all the way through to the backend database (ie, the only id a message gets are its thread id, a timestamp, and some way to ensure a total order in the case of equal timestamps), and the only place in Discourse where the unique Message-ID appears is in the outgoing message. In that case getting any sanity in Discourse email could be very expensive for Discourse.

Personally I don't care how "expensive" it is. The email mode is, to me, a _major_ feature of Discourse. I'm sure I'm not alone is hating forums which require me to go to them (or, equally bad, send some kind of summary of new things - I'm looking at you, Google Groups). That Discourse does quite a good job of letting people participate via the forum or email is very welcome. But it has to be done correctly. Cheers, Cameron Simpson <cs@cskk.id.au>

Le 21/07/2022 à 03:29, Stephen J. Turnbull a écrit :

I can't speak to 1 and 2, and I can't speak to cost of resource usage for 3, but it would be possible to have a Mailman list that has no subscribers, prohibits subscription, and allows only a small number of authorized posters, one of which would be the Discourse mail feed.

Hi, If GMANE would be allowed to subscribe, that would be a perfect fit! Cheers, baptiste

Hi Brett, I understand your points. I think the main point of difference is the gap in usability between GitHub discussions and Discourse - I think it's massive, but I understand others will be less enamoured by GitHub and less frustrated by Discourse than me. One correction: but that does make the discussion specific to the repo With Organisation Discussions <https://github.blog/changelog/2022-04-12-organization-discussions/>, discussions are attached to the organisation, not a repr. Samuel -- Samuel Colvin On Fri, 22 Jul 2022 at 19:45, Brett Cannon <brett@python.org> wrote:

On Fri, Jul 22, 2022 at 3:45 AM Samuel Colvin <S@muelcolvin.com> wrote:

...

Reading this thread and thinking about discuss.python.org/Discourse - I'm surprised no one is advocating github discussions <https://docs.github.com/en/discussions>.

I think it's because discuss.python.org is what we decided to try years ago at the 2018 core dev sprint (so nearly 4 years ago), while GitHub Discussions would be a brand new thing to try and get people on board with.

...

In particular organisation discussions <https://github.blog/changelog/2022-04-12-organization-discussions/> would provide an obvious central place for discussions that would be easy to find and use for everyone.

Advantages of github discussions:

- Virtually all developers have a github account and are familiar with github & GFM

Discourse lets you log in via GitHub. I'm not sure if Discourse is straight Commonmark (probably is, though, since the co-creator of Discourse kicked off Commonmark because of Discourse).

...

- Github provides great support for participating or watching discussion via email - Discourse is really bad at this (at least by default) - GH discussions obviously integrate well with the rest of github - links to issues & pull requests (including other repos), discussions can be moved to other repos, issues can be created from discussions, issues can be converted to discussions - e.g. if someone creates a bug report which should really be a feature discussion

True, but that does make the discussion specific to the repo, which in this instance would be CPython and somewhat the language itself. This doesn't encompass something like packaging which has completely moved all development discussions over to discuss.python.org (and people have been generally happy with it). So I'm not sure if moving over to Discussions would actually lead to discuss.python.org going anywhere if you were trying to eliminate that need.

...

- No extra service to maintain or pay for

This is already true for discuss.python.org; Discourse is kindly

donating the hosting on their SaaS platform.

...

- GH discussions (unlike issues) provide good threading functionality without the full treeview madness of hackernews etc.

Before going "all in" with discuss.python.org/Discourse I think GH discussions should be seriously considered.

If you can get people excited enough to say they are willing to give it a try, and the folks saying they are going to stop participating if/when we move to Discourse would actually stay if we moved to Discussions, then we can definitely talk about it.

-Brett

...

Samuel

--

Samuel Colvin

On Fri, 15 Jul 2022 at 12:19, Petr Viktorin <encukou@gmail.com> wrote:

...

Hello, Currently development discussions are split between multiple communication channels, for example: - python-dev and discuss.python.org for design discussions, - GitHub Issues and Pull Requests for specific changes, - IRC, Discord and private chats for real-time discussions, - Topic-specific channels like typing-sig.

While most of these serve different needs, there is too much overlap between python-dev and discuss.python.org. It seems that for most people, this situation is worse than sticking to either one platform – even if we don't go with that person's favorite.

The discuss.python.org experiment has been going on for quite a while, and while the platform is not without its issues, we consider it a success. The Core Development category is busier than python-dev. According to staff, discuss.python.org is much easier to moderate.. If you're following python-dev but not discuss.python.org, you're missing out.

The Steering Council would like to switch from python-dev to discuss.python.org. Practically, this means: - Moving the required PEP announcements to discuss.python.org - Moving discuss.python.org up in the devguide communications page (https://devguide.python.org/communication/) - And that's it?

I imagine that the mailing list will stay around for continuing past discussion threads and for announcements, eventually switching to auto-reject incoming messages with a pointer to discuss.python.org.

To be clear, discuss.python.org allows editing posts, which is frankly handy for typos and clarifications. Editing alone should not be used for adding new info -- we should cultivate a culture of being friendly to mail users & notification watchers. This probably bears repeating in a few places.

We're aware not everyone wants to use the discuss.python.org website, but there are some ways to avoid it:

- For new PEPs, you can point your RSS client to https://www.python.org/dev/peps/peps.rss – it's not e-mail, but many email clients have RSS support. You can also watch the Steering Council issues on GitHub (https://github.com/python/steering-council/issues/) for important questions and discussions.

- You can use discuss.python.org's “mailing list mode” (which subscribes you to all new posts), possibly with filtering and/or categorizing messages locally.

However, we would like to know if this will pose an undue burden to anyone, if there are workflows or usage problems that we are not aware of. As mentioned, this is something the Steering Council thinks is a good idea, but we want to make sure we're aware of all the impact when we make the final decision.

– Petr, on behalf of the Steering Council _______________________________________________ Python-Dev mailing list -- python-dev@python.org To unsubscribe send an email to python-dev-leave@python.org https://mail.python.org/mailman3/lists/python-dev.python.org/ Message archived at https://mail.python.org/archives/list/python-dev@python.org/message/VHFLDK43... Code of Conduct: http://python.org/psf/codeofconduct/

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On Thu, Dec 1, 2022 at 8:37 AM Victor Stinner <vstinner@python.org> wrote:

Should we *close* the python-dev mailing list?

I'd be in favor of this. Or at least setting up an auto-responder suggesting people post on discuss.python.org instead. -gps

On Fri, Dec 2, 2022 at 8:17 AM Baptiste Carvello < devel2022@baptiste-carvello.net> wrote:

Le 02/12/2022 à 10:09, Gregory P. Smith a écrit :

...

On Thu, Dec 1, 2022 at 8:37 AM Victor Stinner <vstinner@python.org <mailto:vstinner@python.org>> wrote:

Should we *close* the python-dev mailing list?

I'd be in favor of this.

Why?

Because in the past people have complained about having too many places to keep track of discussions (and this goes in both directions; some people don't read email regularly while others live in their inbox). Since we are promoting/pushing folks to use discuss.python.org it means this mailing list starts to feel like more of a burden/excess. -Brett

Californian firms won't let their employees use an unmoderated forum for fear of liability: OK, so be it. But that's no reason to force other people to use tools they dislike.

We are just saying that we may, as a team, not want to be the people providing a mailing list for folks to use to discuss Python development. Or at the very least not make it feel like a requirement for core devs to monitor this mailing list like it has been in the past. If people choose to keep using email then they can choose to do so on their own, just like IRC or any other place people chat. -Brett

"Modern tools" hegemonism is little more than pure intolerance.

Or at least setting up an auto-responder

...

suggesting people post on discuss.python.org <http://discuss.python.org> instead.

Just put a line in the list signature stating that discussions requiring core-dev attention should happen on discourse, and be done.

Cheers, Baptiste _______________________________________________ Python-Dev mailing list -- python-dev@python.org To unsubscribe send an email to python-dev-leave@python.org https://mail.python.org/mailman3/lists/python-dev.python.org/ Message archived at https://mail.python.org/archives/list/python-dev@python.org/message/IDKDF7P4... Code of Conduct: http://python.org/psf/codeofconduct/

Perspective from a minor Python contributor: The only thing worse than email or Discourse is email AND Discourse. Fragmented communities are a nightmare. I don't want to post to multiple places in order to reach the devs. Its hard enough to build consensus already. The relative strengths of email vs discourse pale in comparison to the dangers of fragmentation IMO. I prefer mailing lists personally, but theyve been losing out to web forums for 20 years now. In my view, switching solely to Discourse would help ensure the vitality of the Python community for years to come. Barney On Sat, 3 Dec 2022, 21:31 Baptiste Carvello, < devel2022@baptiste-carvello.net> wrote:

Le 02/12/2022 à 18:49, Brett Cannon a écrit :

...

Since we are promoting/pushing folks to use discuss.python.org

Until now I've seen more "pushing" (with sticks) than "promoting" (with carrots).

Since august I've been looking for a way to follow the discussions on discourse without using the heavy and annoying web interface, or building a whole stack of filters on my side. It's annoyingly close to working with RSS: "posts.rss" would just need to keep entries for a longer time, and include category information.

I regret that there seems to be zero interest in fixing those last glitches and making RSS really work.

...

<http://discuss.python.org> it means this mailing list starts to feel like more of a burden/excess.

The "burden" of keeping one additional list on an existing platform is moderate. Nobody would be forced to read it, but interesting ideas would surely be copied over to discourse at some point.

All the death clamors are way premature, and either relate to the "sticks" tactics, or to the usual intolerance of "modern tools" converts.

Baptiste _______________________________________________ Python-Dev mailing list -- python-dev@python.org To unsubscribe send an email to python-dev-leave@python.org https://mail.python.org/mailman3/lists/python-dev.python.org/ Message archived at https://mail.python.org/archives/list/python-dev@python.org/message/UT5T4PZ6... Code of Conduct: http://python.org/psf/codeofconduct/

Oh brilliant. I'll unsubscribe from this list then. It sounds like the only people using it will be those folks who think their tooling preferences are more important than creating a joined-up Python community; I can survive without their input. On Sun, 4 Dec 2022, 19:53 Baptiste Carvello, < devel2022@baptiste-carvello.net> wrote:

Le 04/12/2022 à 16:55, Barney Gale a écrit :

...

I don't want to post to multiple places in order to reach the devs.

Nobody proposed that. In order to reach the devs, you use discourse (or have someone else do it on your behalf).

Just let the "second circle" of the community keep their mailing list, as this second circle just won't switch to a specialized, and quite unflexible tool.

Yeah, without most core devs, this list might be more akin to python-ideas than the old python-dev. But it makes sense to keep the bigger following it has grown over the years.

...

I prefer mailing lists personally, but theyve been losing out to web forums for 20 years now.

This is historically untrue. In technical communities, web forums have been considered second class tools until some 5 years ago, with mailing-lists being seen as lighter, more flexible and more capable.

Invision Power Board, PHPBB and others supplanted mailing lists in the early 00s. Programming communities took longer because they disproportionately attract folks with strong and inflexible preferences.

Then they began loosing to *heavily moderated* web forums because of the insistence on moderation. Yeah, smartphones with no capable mail client played a role too.

Cheers, Baptiste _______________________________________________ Python-Dev mailing list -- python-dev@python.org To unsubscribe send an email to python-dev-leave@python.org https://mail.python.org/mailman3/lists/python-dev.python.org/ Message archived at https://mail.python.org/archives/list/python-dev@python.org/message/A2667BXD... Code of Conduct: http://python.org/psf/codeofconduct/

On Mon, 5 Dec 2022 at 01:00, Steven D'Aprano <steve@pearwood.info> wrote:

On Sun, Dec 04, 2022 at 08:20:56PM +0000, Barney Gale wrote:

...

Oh brilliant. I'll unsubscribe from this list then. It sounds like the only people using it will be those folks who think their tooling preferences are more important than creating a joined-up Python community; I can survive without their input.

My, what a hot take you have there.

Did you consider that we already had "a joined-up Python community" until a subset of people decided to split off to use Discuss to satisfy *their* tooling preferences?

I did; I think it was a mistake to start discourse without a plan for shutting down this mailing list. Two wrongs don't make a right, though.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QhaY1hRDYBg

-- Steve

Hi, Le 05/12/2022 à 14:50, Stephen J. Turnbull a écrit :

I'd be sad, but I get the feeling that the only people left reading it are "here for the community", not to develop code, …

I think this is indeed true, but that's nothing to be sad about: "being here for the community" is not wrong or shameful. Since forever, python-dev has attracted a large following of enthusiast Python users, who want to understand the design choices of their preferred language. This widely shared concern for writing idiomatic code is a distinguishing trait of the Python community (the whole culture of "pythonic" code). Now maybe this is a place where the mailman devs could help and make a real difference: what if this list would become, not archive-only, but a *read-only mirror* of those parts of Discourse that are relevant for core development? That would mean setting up a pipeline starting with Discourse's so-called "mailing-list mode", going through the kind of filter stack that some core developers have been setting up for their personal use, and feeding into this mailing list. The last part can only be done with the powers of the mailman admins. Being read-only would not be a problem in practice: non core-devs here read much more than they post (as they should). Being forced to log into a specific website is an acceptable roadblock once in a while for posting, just not every day for simply following the discussions. Turning this list into a relevant mirror of Discourse is the nicest course of action for the hundreds of silent readers python-dev has gathered over the years. All those people *won't* switch to routinely visiting the Discourse website, no matter how much pushing and wishful thinking the Steering Council puts into it. Shutting down the list means kicking them away, more or less overtly. Cheers, Baptiste

On 06. 12. 22 11:16, Baptiste Carvello wrote:

Hi,

Le 05/12/2022 à 14:50, Stephen J. Turnbull a écrit :

...

I'd be sad, but I get the feeling that the only people left reading it are "here for the community", not to develop code, …

I think this is indeed true, but that's nothing to be sad about: "being here for the community" is not wrong or shameful.

Since forever, python-dev has attracted a large following of enthusiast Python users, who want to understand the design choices of their preferred language. This widely shared concern for writing idiomatic code is a distinguishing trait of the Python community (the whole culture of "pythonic" code).

Now maybe this is a place where the mailman devs could help and make a real difference: what if this list would become, not archive-only, but a *read-only mirror* of those parts of Discourse that are relevant for core development? That would mean setting up a pipeline starting with Discourse's so-called "mailing-list mode", going through the kind of filter stack that some core developers have been setting up for their personal use, and feeding into this mailing list. The last part can only be done with the powers of the mailman admins.

Being read-only would not be a problem in practice: non core-devs here read much more than they post (as they should). Being forced to log into a specific website is an acceptable roadblock once in a while for posting, just not every day for simply following the discussions.

Turning this list into a relevant mirror of Discourse is the nicest course of action for the hundreds of silent readers python-dev has gathered over the years. All those people *won't* switch to routinely visiting the Discourse website, no matter how much pushing and wishful thinking the Steering Council puts into it.

I'd like to point out that the SC decision was *reactive*, after most discussions moved to Discourse without SC pushing. I liked the list myself! But as soon as most of the posts were mandatory PEP and release notices, it stopped being useful.

Shutting down the list means kicking them away, more or less overtly.

Le 07/12/2022 à 11:57, Petr Viktorin a écrit :

I'd like to point out that the SC decision was *reactive*, after most discussions moved to Discourse without SC pushing.

I liked the list myself! But as soon as most of the posts were mandatory PEP and release notices, it stopped being useful.

Well, that's only taking into account the posting side. On the reading side, I reckon that many more people (more or less) silently read python-dev than Discourse. Cheers, Baptiste

I can now pull from Discourse or GH when it’s convenient for me. It’s also much easier to disengage for a few days and catch up later.

I have a question about how you handle multiple communities. I'm subscribed to ~30 python-dev style mailing lists across different projects. There is no way I can open up 30 Discourse sites each day. Mail brings everything into one place for me, and I have things setup so that new mail from python-dev style lists is separated from my general inbox. Are you not subscribed to a bunch of communities? Or is there some way you aggregate or visit each forum that works nicely? Regards, Simon

On 09Dec2022 14:58, Simon Cross <hodgestar+pythondev@gmail.com> wrote:

...

I can now pull from Discourse or GH when it’s convenient for me. It’s also much easier to disengage for a few days and catch up later.

I have a question about how you handle multiple communities. I'm subscribed to ~30 python-dev style mailing lists across different projects. There is no way I can open up 30 Discourse sites each day. Mail brings everything into one place for me, and I have things setup so that new mail from python-dev style lists is separated from my general inbox.

Are you not subscribed to a bunch of communities? Or is there some way you aggregate or visit each forum that works nicely?

I'm not Barry, but I have Discourse's "mailing list mode" enabled for the Python Discourse forums. That delivers all posts to me as email, and my filter rules file almost everything into my "python" mail folder. Same for the matplotlib forum etc. Cheers, Cameron Simpson <cs@cskk.id.au>

It’s possible, but here’s the way I look at it. I’m *already* engaged with dozens of communities, within Python but also others. So every morning I’d wake up to many hundreds of emails, which is just incredibly stress inducing. So it’s a tension between guarding my time better and FOMO. Discourse helps me manage that much better because rather than *all* of those conversations ending up in a bunch of email folders, now they’re just sitting in forum channels. This gives me two advantages: 1) I can pull from the conversations when it’s convenient for me, not when the stress of email hygiene guilts me into it, and 2) it’s so much easier to ignore the stuff I don’t care about, or even skim the stuff I mildly care about, while giving me more quality time to spend on the conversations I do care about. As for python-committers, I turned off most email notifications from GH and use their notifications tab on the issues and PR I care about, and ignore the rest. GH’s notifications page isn’t fantastic, but it’s manageable and seems like a net win for controlling how and when I consume those conversations. My workflow centers around a browser tab group I call “Comms” and there it’s got my webmail, which I use in addition to my desktop mail client, and maybe 4 Discourse tabs for the various communities I follow, one of which is Python’s. I usually just click on the “New” tab for each to see what’s happening, and then go through the conversations I’ve tagged or responded to. I might drop in to those a couple of times a day when things are slow. Then of course there’s Discord for various Python groups, and Python’s Slack. The whole shift away from email leaves me calmer and better engaged. -Barry

On Dec 9, 2022, at 06:49, Stephen J. Turnbull <stephenjturnbull@gmail.com> wrote:

Barry Warsaw writes:

...

I absolutely love not having to slog through hundreds of emails before my first shots of caffeine, and I can now pull from Discourse or GH when it’s convenient for me. It’s also much easier to disengage for a few days and catch up later.

I absolutely cannot imagine slogging through hundreds of posts in the Discourse interface. Couldn't this be, as Baptiste suggests, a symptom of people disengaging and there just being less traffic? Or is it somehow being channeled better so that you're only seeing what interests you now?

In particular I have to suspect that a boatload of those were python-committers mails that are now basically obsolete (can't say, I never have sought enough responsibility that I needed to subscribe to that firehose). But that would help with python-dev/ideas too.

Steve

Ethan Furman writes:

It seems to me the best possible outcome of Discourse vs email is somebody / some company donating the time and/or funding to improve Discourse's and Mailman's abilities to interoperate with each other.

There are fundamental differences between email's aysnchronous message streams and Discourse's enforced single message stream. These can't be perfectly reconciled, despite how fast email can be nowadays. Since Mailman (and its users!) expects messages to arrive asynchronously and handles that using threading information, as far as I can see the Mailman side is handled as well as it can be now that Discourse provides threading information, and you just subscribe Mailman to Discourse. And obviously we can just sign up Discourse to Mailman. The latter direction may be harder, depending on whether Discourse can make sense of batches of messages being composed independently of its message flow. The fact that Discourse didn't provide threading information to email users in the past suggest that it has an alternative mechanism for organizing mail flows, and message IDs and Reference headers from email may not be so easily integrated. I know nothing about Discourse internals, but I suspect that's going to be the difficult part if there is one. With a little luck that will be no problem. ;-) Steve

On Sat 10 Dec, 17:47 +0100, Baptiste Carvello <devel2022@baptiste-carvello.net> wrote:

There is a small catch though: unless I'm mistaken, Discourse won't let you subscribe to just a set of categories, so any filtering has to happen on the Mailman side.

Well, it is actually possible to achieve what you want. I have set up Discourse in mailing-list mode [1]. By default muted categories are not included in the emails you get in mailing list mode. So, you just need to mute all categories you don't care about. It is a bit of work, but it needs to be done only once. To have an almost complete equivalent of the topics that were once discussed on python-dev, you can just mute every thing except the "Core Development" category. This is the setting I am using since a while and I am quite happy with it. You may want to unmute the "PEPs" category as well. Threading info is kept quite nicely, so I read the discourse mail notifications as if it were a mailing list and I almost do not see any difference. Text is sometimes a bit messy if people heavily use the discourse formatting capabilities, but this kind of posts are quite rare in my experience. This does not solve the problem of engaging actively in a discussion, of course, but at least for me it is OK to login to discourse if I have to post, given that 99.99% of the time I just want to read posts in my mail client. Ciao! Tiziano [1] You can do this while editing your profile preferences, under the "Emails" menu

This does not solve the problem of engaging actively in a discussion, of course

I just submitted a proposal to create a Discourse plugin to improve the accuracy of their inbound email parsing, which is something that several people have complained about in this thread. This would enable two things: - Folks who prefer to live in their inbox could continue to do so and contribute by just replying to emails. Discourse currently has reply-by-email, but it often mangles formatting and/or entirely deletes text. Once these issues are fixed, folks who like the current experience would be able to just pretend the forum doesn't exist and continue having the same experience as they currently have with GNU Mailman. - Right now importing the archives from GNU Mailman into Discourse isn't realistic for the same reasons; some messages will import correctly, but others will be mangled or missing text. This means you would still need to maintain the Malman archive as the canonical source of truth. Once fixed, not only would the [Python-Dev] archives be searchable within Discourse, but they should also rank better in search than they do in their current archive. If this is something you care about (positively or negatively), here is the exploratory proposal: https://meta.discourse.org/t/proposed-plugin-to-improve-reply-by-email-accur... Any feedback and/or testing would be much appreciated! Right now Discourse recognizes that this is a problem and is interested in solving it, but getting it prioritized will require folks to A) speak up saying they want it done B) test the underlying API to verify that it actually solves the problem. Alex On Sun, Dec 11, 2022 at 1:54 PM Tiziano Zito <opossumnano@gmail.com> wrote:

On Sat 10 Dec, 17:47 +0100, Baptiste Carvello < devel2022@baptiste-carvello.net> wrote:

...

There is a small catch though: unless I'm mistaken, Discourse won't let you subscribe to just a set of categories, so any filtering has to happen on the Mailman side.

Well, it is actually possible to achieve what you want.

I have set up Discourse in mailing-list mode [1].

By default muted categories are not included in the emails you get in mailing list mode.

So, you just need to mute all categories you don't care about. It is a bit of work, but it needs to be done only once. To have an almost complete equivalent of the topics that were once discussed on python-dev, you can just mute every thing except the "Core Development" category. This is the setting I am using since a while and I am quite happy with it. You may want to unmute the "PEPs" category as well.

Threading info is kept quite nicely, so I read the discourse mail notifications as if it were a mailing list and I almost do not see any difference. Text is sometimes a bit messy if people heavily use the discourse formatting capabilities, but this kind of posts are quite rare in my experience.

This does not solve the problem of engaging actively in a discussion, of course, but at least for me it is OK to login to discourse if I have to post, given that 99.99% of the time I just want to read posts in my mail client.

Ciao! Tiziano

[1] You can do this while editing your profile preferences, under the "Emails" menu _______________________________________________ Python-Dev mailing list -- python-dev@python.org To unsubscribe send an email to python-dev-leave@python.org https://mail.python.org/mailman3/lists/python-dev.python.org/ Message archived at https://mail.python.org/archives/list/python-dev@python.org/message/7ZJWPADS... Code of Conduct: http://python.org/psf/codeofconduct/

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I'm presuming we're talking about ways to bidirectionally mirror between mailman and a Discourse forum. On 10Dec2022 21:21, Stephen J. Turnbull <stephenjturnbull@gmail.com> wrote:

Since Mailman (and its users!) expects messages to arrive asynchronously and handles that using threading information, as far as I can see the Mailman side is handled as well as it can be now that Discourse provides threading information, and you just subscribe Mailman to Discourse.

That would work for receiving Discourse posts into the Mailman mailing list.

And obviously we can just sign up Discourse to Mailman.

Can we? If you're talking about posts from the mailing list appearing on Discourse, this isn't trivial.

The latter direction may be harder, depending on whether Discourse can make sense of batches of messages being composed independently of its message flow.

It (anecdotally, link lower down) looks like you can make a new Topic (thread) on Discourse if your user has a sufficient trust level (discourse users become more trusted over time). But the message author needs to be a Discourse user. So either all the individual mailman users need to be Discourse members _or_ the from address needs to be a list-wide id (eg the list submission address), but then the posts won't have the right author on the Discourse side. None of that is easy to fix - mailing lists essentially just forward messages, with some gatewaying of what messages they allow inbound depending on the list. By contrast, Discourse posts have authors which must be Discourse users.

The fact that Discourse didn't provide threading information to email users in the past suggest that it has an alternative mechanism for organizing mail flows, and message IDs and Reference headers from email may not be so easily integrated.

No, that stuff works ok now. For new Topics (threads) this post: https://discourse.gnome.org/t/email-use-of-discourse-how-to-start-a-new-thre... sugggests that you can email to a specific category and I presume it would appear as a new Topic. I suspect any `In-Reply-To` or `References` would be ignored. For replies, the email goes to a post-specific address which is used to stitch the message into an existing Topic discussion thread. The outgoing `In-Reply-To` and `References` headers are made on the fly when Discourse sends the post as email to whichever users are set up to receive an email copy. The source `Message-ID` is preserved.

I know nothing about Discourse internals, but I suspect that's going to be the difficult part if there is one. With a little luck that will be no problem. ;-)

I know a little, but not a lot. In short: copying the Discourse stuff to mailman could be done by subscribing the mailman list to the Discourse forum. Letting _nonDiscourse_ users reply or post to Discourse is not trivial. Cheers, Cameron Simpson <cs@cskk.id.au>

Cameron Simpson writes:

I'm presuming we're talking about ways to bidirectionally mirror between mailman and a Discourse forum.

Yes.

None of that is easy to fix - mailing lists essentially just forward messages, with some gatewaying of what messages they allow inbound depending on the list. By contrast, Discourse posts have authors which must be Discourse users.

That's not a problem in principle, because Mailman at python.org insists on list membership for posts. It could be a minor annoyance for users because Mailman allows a user to have a variety of email addresses, so you actually have to check which address you've been using. Perhaps people with multiple Mailman subscriptions would have to reconfigure their so they all use the address that Discourse knows, and their Mailman subscriptions to access mail from that address. I don't think that's a big deal, but it's there.

I suspect any `In-Reply-To` or `References` would be ignored.

That could be problematic. Not sure about that.

For replies, the email goes to a post-specific address which is used to stitch the message into an existing Topic discussion thread.

This could work! I guess for "to message" replies it would cut Mailman out of the loop (the reply would go author -> Discourse -> Mailman), so it might be a little odd in the user's mail client and in Mailman archives (assuming they were desired and permitted).

The outgoing `In-Reply-To` and `References` headers are made on the fly when Discourse sends the post as email to whichever users are set up to receive an email copy. The source `Message-ID` is preserved.

I don't see why that would be a big problem. Threading would be a little less robust, but would work 99% as well as with full References.

Letting _nonDiscourse_ users reply or post to Discourse is not trivial.

I don't think that would be desired. It would be nice for users if existing Mailman User addresses could be grandfathered into Discourse just to save them ten minutes navigating the Discourse signup, but it's not obvious to me that's desirable or desired by Discourse admins. On the other hand, Discourse's members-only policy is basically the same as Mailman's, so we'd probably lose a boatload of python-dev lurkers, but nobody can complain about the principle. Steve

Le 07/12/2022 à 16:11, John Ehresman a écrit :

I’ve found that using mailing list mode to lurk on discuss.python.org works well. I’ve set up rules on my local mail client to archive what I don’t want in my inbox; I have 4 rules in place now, though I’m interested in a bit more than what was typically on python-dev.

I trust you that mailing list mode can work, once you've refined your filter rules. Others have posted similar results. However, each user writing their own filter rules doesn't scale well. Most people just won't do it. If this list really is to be shut down with no continuation, hopefully we'll be given advance warning and allowed some more time to exchange working, refined recipes. Cheers, Baptiste

On Fri, 02 Dec 2022 18:41:44 -0500 "Gordon R. Burgess" <gordon@parasamgate.com> wrote:

I am a long time lurker here*, a professional and educational user of the language, a list moderator with practical exeperience managing a engaged community of a few thousand users over the course of a decade - and yes, I am old.

I saw what happened when the young developers there insisted that we'd all be much happier with a threaded forum - so nice, if what you want is to browse a web page, or to find all of the points in a (hopefully) threaded discussion.

Well, those developers are not so "young" for the most part :-) Regards Antoine.

On 11 Dec 2022, at 21:05, Abdur-Rahmaan Janhangeer <arj.python@gmail.com> wrote:

If only, fellow list colleagues, I could see only the topics I choose on Discourse.

Have you tried changing the Preferences for Notifications/Categories? That would appear to give you the control you are asking for? Barry

The Discourse feels like python-list, python-dev, python-* combined. I feel cluttered.

If only I could also export the folks using only the mailing list to the Discourse.

If only Discourse was as easy to search and port as a mail archive.

If Python is a community thing, the discourse is it. But, I fear, crafting mail and reading walls of text might become the skills of a bygone age.

On Discourse i miss the simplicity of a medialess, interactionless, botless, privilegeless, notificationless, badgeless platform.

But, we must keep up with advances in tech, cope with different ways, cope with what most people use. It's the way forward.

Next time, see you at PythonHut in the Metaverse.

Kind Regards,

Abdur-Rahmaan Janhangeer about <https://compileralchemy.github.io/> | blog <https://www.pythonkitchen.com/> github <https://github.com/Abdur-RahmaanJ> Mauritius _______________________________________________ Python-Dev mailing list -- python-dev@python.org To unsubscribe send an email to python-dev-leave@python.org https://mail.python.org/mailman3/lists/python-dev.python.org/ Message archived at https://mail.python.org/archives/list/python-dev@python.org/message/JA76LADB... Code of Conduct: http://python.org/psf/codeofconduct/