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 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

On Fri, Mar 29, 2019 at 11:56 AM David Mertz 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

On Fri, Mar 29, 2019 at 2:07 PM Stephen J. Turnbull 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

On Fri, Mar 29, 2019 at 8:41 PM Steven D'Aprano 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

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 wrote:

On Fri, Mar 29, 2019 at 8:41 PM Steven D'Aprano 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/