Re: [Python-ideas] New Project to Capture summaries from this
Chris, As a new member to this list, I can tell you that searching for relevant old content was effectively impossible, so I'm all for some way of doing that. Please can I make a more radical suggestion, though: Drop the mailing list. How about a GitHub repo - a specific one (with no code), specifically for early ideas? Then, if an idea was accepted and turned into an issue to be implemented, it could link back to that original discussion. GitHub is easily searchable. It can email you if someone comments on an issue you have raised, etc. An alternative might be a StackOverflow section, but that wouldn't provide such tight integration in the case of an issue being raised. The new work you're doing would be a good way to populate the repo with its initial content. Richard
Hi Richard, there's been lots of discussion about that in the past. You can check out https://discuss.python.org, which is the current most popular idea about an alternative. It has not been decided if the mailing lists will be dropped or not though, as far as I know. Lys On Thu, Mar 28, 2019 at 4:30 PM Richard Whitehead < richard.whitehead@ieee.org> wrote:
Chris,
As a new member to this list, I can tell you that searching for relevant old content was effectively impossible, so I'm all for some way of doing that.
Please can I make a more radical suggestion, though: Drop the mailing list. How about a GitHub repo - a specific one (with no code), specifically for early ideas? Then, if an idea was accepted and turned into an issue to be implemented, it could link back to that original discussion. GitHub is easily searchable. It can email you if someone comments on an issue you have raised, etc.
An alternative might be a StackOverflow section, but that wouldn't provide such tight integration in the case of an issue being raised.
The new work you're doing would be a good way to populate the repo with its initial content.
Richard
_______________________________________________ Python-ideas mailing list Python-ideas@python.org https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-ideas Code of Conduct: http://python.org/psf/codeofconduct/
there's been lots of discussion about that in the past.
Indeed. Personally, I’m all for keeping the mailing list. See past discussions for the advantage. I do think it might be a good idea to move to a gitHub repo once a topic gets past the vague idea stage to the hammer out a proposal stage — which indeed often happens once someone starts drafting a PEP. But a freewheeling discussion in a gitHub issue isn’t any easier to navigate than a list discussion. This latest effort will only help if it grows to critical mass — but newbies can help! For example, if you see a post here that says something to the effect of: “this has been discussed in the past on this list”, you can search and find hat discussion, and summarize the results for future readers. Hmm, maybe the “we should use something other than a list” discussion is one of those ;-) -CHB You can check out https://discuss.python.org, which is the current most
popular idea about an alternative. It has not been decided if the mailing lists will be dropped or not though, as far as I know.
Lys
On Thu, Mar 28, 2019 at 4:30 PM Richard Whitehead < richard.whitehead@ieee.org> wrote:
Chris,
As a new member to this list, I can tell you that searching for relevant old content was effectively impossible, so I'm all for some way of doing that.
Please can I make a more radical suggestion, though: Drop the mailing list. How about a GitHub repo - a specific one (with no code), specifically for early ideas? Then, if an idea was accepted and turned into an issue to be implemented, it could link back to that original discussion. GitHub is easily searchable. It can email you if someone comments on an issue you have raised, etc.
An alternative might be a StackOverflow section, but that wouldn't provide such tight integration in the case of an issue being raised.
The new work you're doing would be a good way to populate the repo with its initial content.
Richard
_______________________________________________ Python-ideas mailing list Python-ideas@python.org https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-ideas Code of Conduct: http://python.org/psf/codeofconduct/
_______________________________________________ Python-ideas mailing list Python-ideas@python.org https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-ideas Code of Conduct: http://python.org/psf/codeofconduct/
-- Christopher Barker, PhD Python Language Consulting - Teaching - Scientific Software Development - Desktop GUI and Web Development - wxPython, numpy, scipy, Cython
On 28/03/2019 15:25, Richard Whitehead wrote:
Chris,
As a new member to this list, I can tell you that searching for relevant old content was effectively impossible, so I'm all for some way of doing that.
Please can I make a more radical suggestion, though: Drop the mailing list. How about a GitHub repo - a specific one (with no code), specifically for early ideas? Then, if an idea was accepted and turned into an issue to be implemented, it could link back to that original discussion. GitHub is easily searchable. It can email you if someone comments on an issue you have raised, etc.
Github is more searchable than a mailing list (at least until the mailing list archives are made searchable), but is not designed for and is not as good at discussion as a mailing list. Threads of discussion and branch and interweave easily on a mailing list, so you don't lose lines of thought. That lack is the big failing of forum-style interfaces.
An alternative might be a StackOverflow section, but that wouldn't provide such tight integration in the case of an issue being raised.
I think I'd go so far as "Hell, no!" here.
The new work you're doing would be a good way to populate the repo with its initial content.
Having to do new work would certainly discourage some of the less technically well-founded ideas. I don't think that's what you meant, though :-) -- Rhodri James *-* Kynesim Ltd
On Thu, Mar 28, 2019 at 03:25:34PM -0000, Richard Whitehead wrote:
Chris,
As a new member to this list, I can tell you that searching for relevant old content was effectively impossible, so I'm all for some way of doing that.
"Effectively impossible" is a gross exaggeration. The old mailman built-in search functionality is not fantastic, but it's not useless either, and more importantly, Google does a great job of indexing the archives. (I haven't tried it, but I expect Bing does too.) Very occasionally I find that Google's indexes may be off: in the past, if a post was deleted (a rare occurrence, but it did happen from time to time) it would force the remaining posts for that month to get new URLs. But I don't think that's a problem now, and as Google crawls the archives again that will slowly correct itself. Whereas for *me*, three quarters of the functionality on Github doesn't work at all. -- Steven
On Thu, Mar 28, 2019 at 4:52 PM Steven D'Aprano <steve@pearwood.info> wrote:
On Thu, Mar 28, 2019 at 03:25:34PM -0000, Richard Whitehead wrote:
Chris,
As a new member to this list, I can tell you that searching for relevant old content was effectively impossible, so I'm all for some way of doing that.
"Effectively impossible" is a gross exaggeration.
The old mailman built-in search functionality is not fantastic, but it's not useless either, and more importantly, Google does a great job of indexing the archives.
It really doesn't. I often need to look up specific emails in the mail.python.org archives, that I remember seeing or writing, in order to link to them. IME, Google never works for this. For whatever reason, most pages on mail.python.org are not included in Google's index. For example, here's a post of yours from a few weeks ago: https://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-ideas/2019-March/055911.html AFAICT, it is not possible to find that post with Google. For example, doing a site-restricted search with an exact quote from your email says that there are no pages that match: https://www.google.com/search?q="Is+that+common+enough+that+it+needs+to+be+built-in+to+dict+itself%3F"+site%3Amail.python.org (I also just tried a few variants of that search on Bing and DuckDuckGo, and they both failed as well.) The only reliable way that I know of to find emails on mail.python.org is to (a) find the email in my MUA's archives, (b) note author and the date it was sent, (c) navigate through the mailman archives 'date' index to narrow things down, and then click around manually until I find the post I'm looking for. I don't think this proves we should switch to using Github issues or something instead. But I do think we should listen when people say that they're struggling with something, instead of dismissing their concerns. -n -- Nathaniel J. Smith -- https://vorpus.org
On Thu, Mar 28, 2019 at 06:43:39PM -0700, Nathaniel Smith wrote:
For example, here's a post of yours from a few weeks ago: https://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-ideas/2019-March/055911.html
AFAICT, it is not possible to find that post with Google.
For example, doing a site-restricted search with an exact quote from your email says that there are no pages that match: https://www.google.com/search?q="Is+that+common+enough+that+it+needs+to+be+built-in+to+dict+itself%3F"+site%3Amail.python.org
*shrug* Maybe Google hasn't crawled Python-Ideas for March yet. Or maybe they are continuing their ambition to dumb everything down to the lowest common denominator by applying it to search now too. For many years now I've been disappointed at Google search's lack of *precision*: it is really good at finding the same super-popular pages, but not so good at finding *specific* pages even when given exact substrings from that page. Nevertheless, Google is not the only search engine in town. This was the first search I tried: https://duckduckgo.com/?q=site%3Ahttps%3A%2F%2Fmail.python.org+python-ideas+... (second link is the desired page). Here's a second set of search terms which leads to the right page, without even using a site-specific search: https://duckduckgo.com/?q=steven+d%27aprano+%22common+enough%22+built-in+dic... (sixth link) Google does seem worse at this though. Nevertheless, I take your point: the ability of search engines to hit a *specific* page containing an exact phrase seems pretty poor. (As opposed to finding a *popular* page related to the phrase.) But in context, we're not asking people to find a specific page, so this test is totally irrelevant. What we want people to do is find previous discussions. A link to any part of the thread would be sufficient. https://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Ahttps%3A%2F%2Fmail.python.org+python-... links to at least three relevant discussions on the first page. -- Steven
Dropping the mailing list is another topic that often comes up, and is always a terrible idea. Every suggester had a different platform in mind, only consistent in all being vastly worse than email for this purpose That said, if someone writes a FAQ about this mailing list, the first answer can be "We are not moving discussion to GitHub / Slack / Discuss / Reddit / StackOverflow / MediaWiki / graffiti on popular buildings / etc" On Thu, Mar 28, 2019, 11:29 AM Richard Whitehead <richard.whitehead@ieee.org> wrote:
Chris,
As a new member to this list, I can tell you that searching for relevant old content was effectively impossible, so I'm all for some way of doing that.
Please can I make a more radical suggestion, though: Drop the mailing list. How about a GitHub repo - a specific one (with no code), specifically for early ideas? Then, if an idea was accepted and turned into an issue to be implemented, it could link back to that original discussion. GitHub is easily searchable. It can email you if someone comments on an issue you have raised, etc.
An alternative might be a StackOverflow section, but that wouldn't provide such tight integration in the case of an issue being raised.
The new work you're doing would be a good way to populate the repo with its initial content.
Richard
_______________________________________________ Python-ideas mailing list Python-ideas@python.org https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-ideas Code of Conduct: http://python.org/psf/codeofconduct/
On Fri, Mar 29, 2019 at 11:56 AM David Mertz <mertz@gnosis.cx> wrote:
That said, if someone writes a FAQ about this mailing list, the first answer can be "We are not moving discussion to GitHub / Slack / Discuss / Reddit / StackOverflow / MediaWiki / graffiti on popular buildings / etc"
That last one reminds me of XKCD 1810 with its references to "wall (Unix)" and "wall (bathroom)"... General principle: People who complain about email are using suboptimal clients, people who complain about non-email systems are using suboptimal services. And there's nothing that's truly optimal in either case (some email clients do come close, but only for their current users, not for new users). ChrisA
Chris Angelico writes:
General principle: People who complain about email are using suboptimal clients, people who complain about non-email systems are using suboptimal services. And there's nothing that's truly optimal in either case (some email clients do come close, but only for their current users, not for new users).
There's a big difference, though. Email users choose their own email clients. If you choose GMail, well, "sorry, you chose GMail." (I understand that avoiding GMail on Apple handhelds is kinda hard, AppleMail sucking amazingly and all. But writing technical discussion on a phone is strictly for disasters, anyway, at least IME.) We don't have such a choice about the non-email service *at all*, except to use the inevitably sucky email interface. Theoretically one could use the API that clients-in-the-browser use and design and write a new client, but they're often not documented and often don't make backward compatibility promises. Practically, it's a massive undertaking. Not to mention that those alternative clients don't yet exist, whereas email clients that one can modify (or libraries to build one) exist in pretty much every language. Regards, Steve
On Fri, Mar 29, 2019 at 2:07 PM Stephen J. Turnbull <turnbull.stephen.fw@u.tsukuba.ac.jp> wrote:
Chris Angelico writes:
General principle: People who complain about email are using suboptimal clients, people who complain about non-email systems are using suboptimal services. And there's nothing that's truly optimal in either case (some email clients do come close, but only for their current users, not for new users).
There's a big difference, though. Email users choose their own email clients. If you choose GMail, well, "sorry, you chose GMail." (I understand that avoiding GMail on Apple handhelds is kinda hard, AppleMail sucking amazingly and all. But writing technical discussion on a phone is strictly for disasters, anyway, at least IME.)
That's half of my point (the distinction between "suboptimal clients" and "suboptimal services"), but the other half is that every time someone says "sorry, you chose Gmail", there's a lengthy discussion that ends up NOT showcasing any sort of perfect alternative - and often not even any *better* alternatives. Have you ever actually convinced someone to move off Gmail onto some other client? ChrisA
Without getting into the pros and cons of mailing lists versus github versus discourse versus Stackoverflow versus ... On Fri, Mar 29, 2019 at 02:23:52PM +1100, Chris Angelico wrote:
Have you ever actually convinced someone to move off Gmail onto some other client?
Gmail is an email provider with a web interface. As a provider, it is available on any email client, so long as it speaks POP3 or IMAP. It's even officially supported: https://support.google.com/mail/answer/7126229?hl=en (Perhaps I was a bit hasty earlier when I accused Google of trying to dumb *everything* down. Credit where credit is due.) I've never tried this myself, but I know of people who have. -- Steven
On Fri, Mar 29, 2019 at 8:41 PM Steven D'Aprano <steve@pearwood.info> wrote:
On Fri, Mar 29, 2019 at 02:23:52PM +1100, Chris Angelico wrote:
Have you ever actually convinced someone to move off Gmail onto some other client?
Gmail is an email provider with a web interface. As a provider, it is available on any email client, so long as it speaks POP3 or IMAP.
In those terms, I'm talking about convincing someone to move off the _Gmail client_, whether or not they continue using the Gmail service. Have you ever convinced someone to stop using the Gmail web interface and start using some other client, as a means of improving their use of the mailing list (eg to resolve some complaints they were having)? ChrisA
On Fri, Mar 29, 2019 at 10:20:41PM +1100, Chris Angelico wrote:
In those terms, I'm talking about convincing someone to move off the _Gmail client_, whether or not they continue using the Gmail service. Have you ever convinced someone to stop using the Gmail web interface and start using some other client, as a means of improving their use of the mailing list (eg to resolve some complaints they were having)?
Specifically because they complained about *mailing lists*? No. Because they didn't like the Gmail web interface in general, or preferred to use some other email client (such as Outlook)? No, because they didn't need convincing, they already wanted to keep their email client. Make of that what you will :-) -- Steven
I think this thread has gone off-topic as this mailing list is not about Gmail (the client or the service). ;) On Fri, Mar 29, 2019 at 4:21 AM Chris Angelico <rosuav@gmail.com> wrote:
On Fri, Mar 29, 2019 at 8:41 PM Steven D'Aprano <steve@pearwood.info> wrote:
On Fri, Mar 29, 2019 at 02:23:52PM +1100, Chris Angelico wrote:
Have you ever actually convinced someone to move off Gmail onto some other client?
Gmail is an email provider with a web interface. As a provider, it is available on any email client, so long as it speaks POP3 or IMAP.
In those terms, I'm talking about convincing someone to move off the _Gmail client_, whether or not they continue using the Gmail service. Have you ever convinced someone to stop using the Gmail web interface and start using some other client, as a means of improving their use of the mailing list (eg to resolve some complaints they were having)?
ChrisA _______________________________________________ Python-ideas mailing list Python-ideas@python.org https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-ideas Code of Conduct: http://python.org/psf/codeofconduct/
Chris Angelico writes:
Have you ever actually convinced someone to move off Gmail onto some other client?
No, but then, I never tried. I have gotten a couple score people to seriously try about a dozen different MUAs over the last three decades though. It's not impossible. But that's really not relevant. I'm a mail person, I develop Mailman. I'm well aware that the answer is never the logical, obvious, and invariably effective when tried "get a better client", it's always "impose my preferences on everybody I might correspond with." Nobody is contesting that. What's relevant is that sticking to a crappy mail client is a personal choice. Sticking to the user interface of a web forum is not.
That's half of my point (the distinction between "suboptimal clients" and "suboptimal services"), but the other half is that every time someone says "sorry, you chose Gmail", there's a lengthy discussion that ends up NOT showcasing any sort of perfect alternative - and often not even any *better* alternatives.
"Perfect alternative" is a strawman. There's no perfect alternative. People use email in different ways; different MUAs are suited to different user habits and different mail streams. As for "better" alternatives, there as many MUAs better than GMail as there are programming languages better than original Dartmouth BASIC. They're just not GMail, and will require jumping through hoops to get personal archives moved over, or setting up GMail as an IMAP server, or using different clients for different purposes, which aren't acceptable to most people. Still, that's their choice. And their life won't be worse than it is now. Those of us who have exercised choice and invested in productive use of email will lose both productivity and choice, for questionable net benefit to the project, even assuming that those who prefer Discourse or Zulip or whatever get the benefits they expect. Steve
participants (10)
-
Brett Cannon -
Chris Angelico -
Christopher Barker -
David Mertz -
Lysandros Nikolaou -
Nathaniel Smith -
Rhodri James -
Richard Whitehead -
Stephen J. Turnbull -
Steven D'Aprano