Brett wrote:
What this means is we occasionally have to evaluate whether our ways of communicating are too antiquated for new participants in open source and whether they are no longer the most effective (because old does not mean bad, but it does not mean better either), while balancing it with not having constant churn or inadvertently making things worse.
Discourse aside, I’m really glad to see that people understand that this is important to the long-term health of Python — as a community and otherwise — and are willing to give it priority. (And I totally agree that significant workflow changes, or discussions thereof, should happen infrequently and be evaluated carefully for their cost and benefit over time.)
Donald wrote:
I think one of the things we’re seeing across all of F/OSS is that for the newer generation of developers, UX matters, in many cases more than F/OSS does and they’re less willing to put up with bad UX.
I can attest to this personally, and I’ll also offer this conjecture:
I don’t think older generations of developers are intrinsically any more tolerant of bad UX than the younger generations are. They hate bad UX too, and they had to figure out their own solutions to make things better — their email filters, their clients, their homegrown scripts, etc. — when nothing better was available, and eventually settled into a flow that worked for them.
Nick
If both Discourse and Mailman can live side-by-side, with
Discourse being the “web interface” to the Mailman list,I think we’d get the best of both worlds.
Funny you ask that, since I wondered about exactly the same thing when I looked into using Discourse for an Apache project. The Apache Software Foundation has a strict policy about ASF-owned mailing lists being the place of discussion, so the only way Discourse would have been able to play a role was as an interface to an existing, ASF-owned mailing list.
Here is the discussion I started about this on Discourse Meta around a year ago.
In short, I think the answer that came out from that discussion is (quoting Jeff Atwood; emphasis his):
This really depends on the culture of the mailing list. Discourse has fairly robust email support (for notifications, and if configured, for replies and email-in to start new topics), but it is still fundamentally web-centric in the way that it views the world. There will be clashes for people who are 100% email-centric.
Do you have support from the “powers that be” at said mailing lists to make such a change? Are they asking for such a change? We are very open to working with a partner on migrating mailing lists and further enhancing the mailing list support in Discourse, but it very much requires solid support from the leadership and a significant part of the community.
There’s a lot of friction involved in changes for groups!
Nick
On Sun, Jan 31, 2016 at 2:21 PM Ben Finney <ben+python@benfinney.id.au> wrote:Brett Cannon <brett@python.org> writes:
> For instance, people have said they don't want to set up another
> account.
The complaint expressed (by me, at least; perhaps others agree) was not
against setting up an account. As you point out, PSF mailing lists
already require creating accounts. It's against being required to
maintain a trusted relationship with some non-PSF-accountable entity, in
order to participate in some aspect of Python community.
I agree with others that a Discourse instance entirely controlled by PSF
would avoid that problem.
--
\ “Consider the daffodil. And while you're doing that, I'll be |
`\ over here, looking through your stuff.” —Jack Handey |
_o__) |
Ben Finney
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