I didn't really address your point there; indirectly mine was to reaffirm a sense that not all participants may want to read the opinions of others while learning technologies, and that's why I am skeptical of the suggestions to include subjective user ratings of any kind within Python packaging infrastructure. On Sun, Jul 9, 2023, 16:09 James Addison <jay@jp-hosting.net> wrote:
On Sun, Jul 9, 2023, 15:52 Stephen J. Turnbull < turnbull.stephen.fw@u.tsukuba.ac.jp> wrote:
James Addison via Python-ideas writes:
The implementation of such a system could either be centralized or distributed; the trust signals that human users infer from it should always be distributed.
ISTM the primary use cases advanced here have been for "naive" users. Likely they won't be in a position to decide whether they trust Guido van Rossum or Egg Rando more. So in practice they'll often want to go with some kind of publicly weighted average of scores.
To avoid the problem of ballot-box stuffing, you could go the way that pro sports often do for their All-Star teams: have one vote by anybody who cares to register an ID, and another by verified committers, including committers from "trusted" projects as well.
As someone who sometimes prefers to learn independently -- even if that takes longer and may produce unusual perspectives -- I remember learning web development by reading the source HTML of websites.
Maybe that wouldn't be the typical way to learn programming -- but given the volume of successful and important software that exists in the world today, I think that having that code and the packages that it is composed of available to learn from would be highly beneficial to maintainers, educators and students, and other groups as well.