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One defect of a mailing list is the difficulty of viewing a weighted average of opinions. The benefit is that anyone can voice an opinion. This is more like the Senate than the House -- Rhode Island appears (on paper) to have as much influence as California. Luckily, we have a form of President. I'm guessing a House occurs in a more private mode of communication? Perhaps as the community gets larger, a system like StackOverflow might be a better tool for handling things like Python-Ideas.
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On Thu, Jan 28, 2016 at 09:55:42PM -0600, Michael Selik wrote:
The Python community is not a democracy. Voting +1, -1 etc. should not be interpreted as *actual* votes that need to counted and averaged, but as personal opinions intended to give other members of the community an idea of whether or not you would like to see a proposed feature. -- Steve
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On 29 January 2016 at 18:03, Steven D'Aprano <steve@pearwood.info> wrote:
Right, in terms of the language and standard library design, some of the essential points to note are: - individual core committers have the authority to make changes (although we vary in how comfortable we are exercising that authority) - one of the things we're responsible for is judging what topics can be handled with just a tracker discussion, what would benefit from a mailing list thread, and what would benefit from going through the full PEP process (this is still an art rather than a science, which is why it isn't documented very well) - https://docs.python.org/devguide/experts.html#experts records the areas we individually feel comfortable exerting authority over - the PEP process itself is defined in https://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0001/ - one relatively common cause of escalation from tracker issues to mailing list discussions is when consensus can't be reached in a smaller forum, so perspectives are sought from a slightly wider audience to see if that tips the balance one way or another - when consensus still can't be reached (and nobody wants to escalate to the full PEP process in order to request an authoritative decision), then the status quo wins stalemates The python-dev and python-ideas communities form a very important part of that process, but the most valuable things folks bring are additional perspectives (whether that's in the form of different use cases, additional domains of expertise, knowledge of practices in other programming language communities, etc) Cheers, Nick. -- Nick Coghlan | ncoghlan@gmail.com | Brisbane, Australia
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On Sat, Jan 30, 2016 at 1:31 AM, Nick Coghlan <ncoghlan@gmail.com> wrote:
This. As mentioned in PEP 10 [1], it's the explanations and justifications, far more than the votes, that make the real difference. That said, though, the votes are a great way of gauging the support levels for a set of similar proposals (eg syntactic options), where the proposer of the idea doesn't particularly care which of the options is picked. It's still not in any way democratic, as evidenced by the vote in PEP 308 [2], which had four options clearly better than the others, but the one that's now in the language was the last of those four in the votes. ChrisA [1] https://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0010/ [2] https://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0308/
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I support a stack exchange website. Quite often here a few members overwhelm the email exchanges and the ideas no matter how clearly you've explained them get buried in your very first email which you have to repeat over and over and basically the discussion becomes answering different here and there criticisms of a particular member. I mean the conversation can quickly become only marginally relevant to the entirety of your idea. I think stack exchange can sort out that chaos considerably and if core developers don't really are looking for consensus, that's okay; at least the convesation is sorted out. Every new visitor has a chance of first seeing the idea proposed at the top of the page, then the comments and answers. On Fri, Jan 29, 2016 at 9:38 AM, Chris Angelico <rosuav@gmail.com> wrote:
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On 30 January 2016 at 01:30, Mirmojtaba Gharibi <mojtaba.gharibi@gmail.com> wrote:
I support a stack exchange website.
There are lots of things we could do to improve the communications infrastructure the PSF provides the community, but the current limiting factors are management capacity and (infrastructure) contributor time, rather than ideas for potential improvement :) There's also a vicious cycle where the limited management capacity makes it difficult to use volunteer time effectively, which is why the PSF is currently actively attempting to break that cycle by hiring an Infrastructure Manager (applications already closed for that role, though). Cheers, Nick. -- Nick Coghlan | ncoghlan@gmail.com | Brisbane, Australia
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On Fri, Jan 29, 2016 at 7:39 AM, Nick Coghlan <ncoghlan@gmail.com> wrote:
I do have to say I find the idea of using a dedicated StackExchange site intriguing. I have been a big fan of its cofounder Joel Spolsky for many years. A StackExchange discussion has some advantages over a thread in a mailing list -- it's got a clear URL that everyone can easily find and reference (as opposed to the variety of archive sites that are currently used), and there is a bit more structure to the discussion (question, answers, comments). I believe there are some good examples of other communities of experts that have really benefited (e.g. mathoverflow.net). A downside may be that it's hard to read via an email client (although you can set up notifications). That doesn't bother me personally (I live in a web browser these days anyway) but I can imagine it will be harder for some folks to participate. I don't think it takes much effort to set up one of these -- if someone feels particularly strong about this I encourage them to figure out how to set up a StackExchange site to augment python-ideas. (I think that's where we should start; leave python-dev alone.) -- --Guido van Rossum (python.org/~guido)
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On 01/29/2016 08:19 AM, Guido van Rossum wrote:
I am also a big fan of StackExchange, but the StackExchange sites are about questions and answers, while Python-Ideas is about ideas and discussion. Given that extensive comments on a question or answer is discouraged, multiple answers trying to follow a thread of discussion would be confusing, and the person asking the question would be the one selecting the "approved" answer (which may have nothing to do with the actual outcome), I don't see this as being a good fit. -- ~Ethan~
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On Fri, Jan 29, 2016 at 11:34 AM, Ethan Furman <ethan@stoneleaf.us> wrote:
As a longtime follower of the SE site-creation process, I'd have to agree. There's pretty much no way such a site would get past the existing site-creation process. I suspect even a special arrangement with the Stack Overflow upper management bypassing the regular process wouldn't happen. In any event, a site that creates the illusion that "Create a Python 2.8!" having a ton of upvotes means something seems like a Bad Idea.
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On 29 January 2016 at 14:45, Geoffrey Spear <geoffspear@gmail.com> wrote:
Creating an instance of a S.O. like site, does not mean getting an official Stack Exchange site- just instantiate some OpenSource product that have the same look and feel (and responsiveness) I know that Ubuntu people run something similar, for example.
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On Fri, Jan 29, 2016, at 11:49, Joao S. O. Bueno wrote:
Ask Ubuntu is, in fact, a real Stack Exchange site (AIUI they did the "special arrangement" thing). Stack Exchange's software is not itself open source, though http://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/2267/stack-exchange-clones lists some "clones" (other software packages that provide varying degrees of the same look and feel).
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On Fri, 29 Jan 2016 at 08:35 Ethan Furman <ethan@stoneleaf.us> wrote:
A better fit would be something like https://www.uservoice.com/ if people wanted a focused "vote on ideas" solution, or something like https://www.discourse.org/ for a more modern forum platform that has the concept of likes for a thread. And then there's https://gitlab.com/mailman/hyperkitty as Barry suggested to add the equivalent of what Discourse has to Mailman 3.
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On Fri, Jan 29, 2016 at 05:56:57PM +0000, Brett Cannon wrote:
A better fit would be something like https://www.uservoice.com/ if people wanted a focused "vote on ideas" solution,
I don't think treating language design as a participatory democracy would be a good idea, even if it were practical. (How could you get all Python users to vote? Do casual users who only use Python occasionally get fractional votes?) If it were, Python would probably look and behave a lot more like PHP. And even representative democracy has practical problems. (Who speaks for the users of numpy? Sys admins? Teachers?) I'm 100% in favour of community participation and would like to encourage people to participate and be heard, but I don't think we should have any illusions about the fundamentally non-democratic nature of language design. Nor do I think that's necessarily a bad thing. Not everything needs to be decided by voting. I think it is far more honest to admit that language design is always going to be an authoritarian process where a small elite, possibly even a single person, decides what makes it into the language and what doesn't, than to try to claim democratic legitimcy via voting that cannot possibly be representative.
Ah, "like" buttons. The way to feel good about yourself for participating without actually participating :-) Well, I suppose it's a bit less disruptive than having hordes of "Me too!!!1!" posts. -- Steve
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On Fri, Jan 29, 2016 at 8:10 PM, Steven D'Aprano <steve@pearwood.info> wrote:
Let me clarify why I like StackExchange. I don't care about the voting for/against answers or even about the selection of the "best" answer by the OP. I do like that the reputation system of the site automatically recognizes users who should be given more responsibilities (up to and including deleting inappropriate posts -- rarely). What I like most is that the site encourages the creation of artifacts that are useful to reference later, e.g. when a related issue comes up again later. And I think it will be easier for new folks to participate than the current mailing list (where if you don't sign up for it you're likely to miss most replies, while if you do sign up, you'll be inundated with traffic -- not everybody is a wizard at managing high volume mailing list traffic). I don't understand the issues brought up about the SE site creation process. 22 years ago we managed to create a Usenet newsgroup, comp.lang.python. Surely today we can figure out how to create a SE site? -- --Guido van Rossum (python.org/~guido)
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Guido van Rossum <guido@python.org> writes:
We have done, several times. One popular option is Askbot <URL:https://pypi.python.org/pypi/askbot/>. I'd be happy to see a PSF-blessed instance of Askbot running at a ‘foo.python.org’ domain. That said, it would be wise to reflect that creating the software is not the hard part; continually responding to community needs, and managing the system so desirable behaviours are encouraged, is the hard part <URL:http://www.90percentofeverything.com/2009/07/08/jeff-atwood-on-spit-and-poli...>. -- \ “If nature has made any one thing less susceptible than all | `\ others of exclusive property, it is the action of the thinking | _o__) power called an idea” —Thomas Jefferson, 1813-08-13 | Ben Finney
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On Fri, Jan 29, 2016 at 9:16 PM, Ben Finney <ben+python@benfinney.id.au> wrote:
Oh, I wasn't talking about creating more software. I was assuming we could find a way to join the SE network. IOW let Jeff Atwood and co. take care of that stuff, so we can focus on having meaningful discussions. (Or were you trolling?) -- --Guido van Rossum (python.org/~guido)
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Guido van Rossum <guido@python.org> writes:
Ah. I guess I work from the assumption we'd want the PSF to keep control of our own tools for collaboration, unless there's good reason otherwise.
(Or were you trolling?)
No, just didn't understand the differing priorities. -- \ “I doubt, therefore I might be.” —anonymous | `\ | _o__) | Ben Finney
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On 30 January 2016 at 15:24, Guido van Rossum <guido@python.org> wrote:
Area 51 is their process for doing that: http://area51.stackexchange.com/ However, while Stack Exchange style sites can be good for "Why is this existing thing the way it is?" Q&A, they're not really designed for proposing *changes* to things, discussing the prospective merits of those changes, and coming to a decision. Loomio is a good example of a site that offers some much better tools for collaborative discussion and decision making: https://www.loomio.org/ You still have the "critical mass" problem though, and for CPython, the critical mass of eyeballs is on python-dev and python-ideas - hence the inclination to try to update that infrastructure to Mailman 3 transparently (thus providing a much improved web gateway for potential new participants and better list management tools for existing subscribers), rather than trying to convince current list members to switch to a different technology. Cheers, Nick. -- Nick Coghlan | ncoghlan@gmail.com | Brisbane, Australia
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Steven D'Aprano writes:
I don't think treating language design as a participatory democracy would be a good idea, even if it were practical.
Fred Brooks (The Mythical Man-Month, "The Surgical Team") agreed with you 40 years ago. In fact he argued that dictatorship was best for software systems in general.
Ah, "like" buttons. The way to feel good about yourself for participating without actually participating :-)
Guido van Rossum[1] responds:
But as you'll recall Antoine not so long ago no-mail'ed python-ideas and possibly python-dev because of the volume of participation by people whose comments were unlikely in the extreme to have any effect on the decision being discussed.[2] I don't know how many other core developers have taken that course, but there certainly was a lot of sympathy for Antoine -- and IMO justifiably so. Noblesse oblige can go only so far, and in the face of "like" buttons.... I agree that reputation systems are very interesting, but in the case of design channels that need (in the sense Steven described well) to be dominated by an "elite", I suspect they could make it very hard to achieve promotion to "elite" status as quickly as python-dev often does. I consider the openness of Python core to potential new members[3] to be a distinguishing characteristic of this community. It would be unfortunate if potential were obscured by initial low reputation. On the other hand, one attribute that you have mentioned (the ease of finding issues) has a useful effect. To the extent that StackExchange makes traffic management easy (specifically filtering, threading, and linking), it might encourage users to follow links to other threads where relevant discussion is posted. In the thread where Antoine spoke up, the fact that the discussion that led to the main decision was on python-committers almost certainly had a lot to do with the fact that most of the posts were unaware that the main decision was final, and of the reasons for and against the decision that had already been discussed. And those reasons were rehashed endlessly! A forum that encourages retrieval of previous discussion before posting would make a big difference, I suspect. Eg, one with a check box "I have read and understood the discussions cited and I still want to post"[4] for comment entry and a "No! He didn't do his homework!" button next to the posted comment.<wink/> But an experiment, eg, with core-mentorship or a SIG, would be good. As Ben says, designing systems involving people is *hard*, and you frequently see unintended effects. Unfortunately, those effects are perverse far more often than not.[5] Footnotes: [1] The juxtaposition of Guido's words with Steven's is intentional, though no insult is intended to either. [2] I'm sorry about the wording, but I don't have a better one. Python channels do not ignore *people*. However, new participants are more like to make comments that will have no effect, and thus their comments are likely to be ignored or dismissed with a stock response. Especially if to the experienced eye the comment has already been responded to fully in the same thread. [3] Every core wants new members who can fit right in. What makes Python different from the typical project is effective mentoring of those with mere potential. [4] Like the old Usenet newsreaders used to. [5] Which is why my field is justifiably known as "The Dismal Science."
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On Sat, Jan 30, 2016 at 02:52:11PM +0900, Stephen J. Turnbull wrote:
To be honest, I don't think that would make that big of a difference, less so than the difference caused by having the discussion area more easily accessible. In the end, there's always going to be a group of people who are likely to ignore best practices and add irrelevant comments (some of whom will not really learn). In fact, I'd expect the ease of using a website to make it more likely for people to join which at first do not follow best practices at all. Think of using a mailing list as placing a filter on minimum intellect. I'm also a visitor on some of the stack-exchange sites, and I see a lot of topics that gets closed quite soon-ish on account of not fitting the model of a Q&A site for [insert any of a thousand reasons here]. On the other hand, in (at least) python-ideas and python-dev, I don't see any 'crap' coming by. Sometimes an idea I might think of as crap, but at least the idea is (quite often) well-substantiated and argued for in the initial postings. I myself am inclined to assign the praise for the high-quality to not only the core community, but also to the somewhat unusual sign-up procedure[1], and would be very (happily) surprised if the quality would stay the same when switching to something web-based with an obvious UI. [1] Unusual in the sense that it's so not 2016 to have a mailing list instead of a web forum. Mailing lists are a lot less common now than it was some time ago.
Maybe there should be a document describing expected behaviour, instead of expecting people to somehow 'get' it by observing. For instance, I did not know if it was OK for me to say '-1' or '+0' or ... on a suggestion. If there were some guidelines on that, "Everybody can 'vote', but please keep in mind that ..." and "Voting happens by <procedure>" as well as something along the lines of "It's not a democracy, voting is just a way of showing your support for/against, but there will not be a formal tally.".
On that topic, would it make sense to at the very least make a list of some things you want to look for in members 'who can fit right in'? Well, I'm not really sure that would be a good idea, but what I think might be a good idea would be something to help people in drawing up their opening post with an idea. That would help in people getting an idea of what would be effective behaviour. Things like: - If you're proposing syntax changes, please document as fully as possible why what you want is not possible with the current syntax, or just too burdensome. Why what you want to do is common enough to justify the additional burden of the mental overhead the suggested syntax (naturally) imposes. Yes, your new syntax might reduce the mental overhead in the case you are considering, but please keep ... in mind. - ... (Additional suggestions here) (now, I'm just brainstorming here, but suggestions that would help people write better opening posts, or give more effective feedback would probably not hurt. However, I don't think I'm the proper person to write down suggestions like that, as I'm still relatively new)
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So with the upcoming move to GitHub of the CPython repository, planned with PEP-512 [1], what about the idea of creating a Git repository on GitHub to serve as a replacement for a mailing list, for example python-ideas? Such a repo might be hosted off the “Python” GitHub organization: https://github.com/python/python-ideas
Such a repository could address a number of items brought up above, including providing a permanent link to artifacts: comments and threads (issues in the issue tracker). The ability to watch the entire “repo" (mailing list) and unsubscribe to “issues” (threads) that are no longer interesting to a watcher (similarly to the way “muting” works in Gmail). Or vice versa, have notifications off by default and able to opt into notifications if something interesting catches your eye. Additionally, this would provide a straight forward and pretty easy way to link discussions to actual changes other repos in an easier way that something like “CPython at commit XYZ123”. Stephen J. Turnbull writes:
A lot of the filtering, sorting, and other benefits that Stephen mentions would be available through GitHub’s searching capabilities, and others such as tagging of “issues" (mail threads) with labels (peps, new feature, duplicate, change existing functionality, etc come to mind). Additionally, an issue / thread in the repo could be “closed” when it is off topic, with future issues opened being able to be closed, marked as “duplicate” and linked against the old closed issue to try to provide that bit of history without needing to take as much time to re-write the response. Other benefits include syntax highlighting, markdown formatting (which was announced this week [2]), and ability to interact with the thread via email (replying to the email creates a comment on the issue) or through the browser (which is nice for the presumably small, but at least >= 1 population that have their personal email blocked by their corporate firewall). I could also see their being a lot of benefit in making the actual code in the repository to be things like contributing information, what is appropriate to say / ask on each list, etc. For lists like core-workflow I could even see this evolving to where the “Code” was a GitHub Pages [3] page that actually hosts directly something like the contributor guide (which could still live at whatever URL was desired, while letting GitHub do the actual hosting. Extra benefit is that it provides a very straightforward way to update some of the developer, contributor, and mentoring guides. It doesn’t “solve” some of the other issues such as voting, reputation of a user, etc, However, I’m not hearing a resounding desire for those anyways. There is at least *some* precedent for this in the form of the Government GitHub [4][5] community and related agencies such as 18F [6]. The former of which has a “best practices” repository [7] which serves this same purpose of communicating and discussing ideas, without necessarily being a code repository. Unfortunately, that repository is a private repository and requires a government email address and joining the “government” organization to access; see [8] for details on joining if you’re interested. [1] https://github.com/brettcannon/github-transition-pep/blob/master/pep-0512.rs... <https://github.com/brettcannon/github-transition-pep/blob/master/pep-0512.rs...> [2] https://github.com/blog/2097-improved-commenting-with-markdown <https://github.com/blog/2097-improved-commenting-with-markdown> [3] https://pages.github.com [4] https://government.github.com/ <https://government.github.com/> [5] https://github.com/government <https://github.com/government> [6] https://github.com/18F/ <https://github.com/18F/> [7] https://github.com/government/best-practices <https://github.com/government/best-practices> [8] https://github.com/government/welcome <https://github.com/government/welcome> ~ Ian Lee | IanLee1521@gmail.com <mailto:IanLee1521@gmail.com>
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On Sat, Jan 30, 2016 at 7:47 PM, Ian Lee <ianlee1521@gmail.com> wrote:
How do you change the subject line to indicate that the topic has drifted (or is a spin-off), while still appropriately quoting the previous post? Most web-based discussion systems are built around a concept of "initial post" and "replies", where the replies always tie exactly to one initial post. The branching of discussion threads never seems to work as well as it does in netnews or email. ChrisA
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True, you don’t get quite as nice forking of issues, though other solutions mentioned (e.g. StackOverflow) would have similar issues. Off the cuff, I’d suggest that this linking could be handled by creating a new issue which linked to the old issue [1] with something like “continuing from #12345 …”. This would actually provide an improvement over the current email approach which only really provides a link from the forked thread back to the original, by creating a reference / link to the forked issue in the original, e.g. how [2] and [3] are linked. [1] https://help.github.com/articles/autolinked-references-and-urls/#issues-and-... <https://help.github.com/articles/autolinked-references-and-urls/#issues-and-...> [2] https://github.com/python/typing/issues/135 <https://github.com/python/typing/issues/135> [3] https://github.com/python/typing/issues/136 <https://github.com/python/typing/issues/136>
~ Ian Lee | IanLee1521@gmail.com <mailto:IanLee1521@gmail.com>
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Chris Angelico <rosuav@gmail.com> writes:
You're free to quote any post anywhere, even if you make a new thread. In general to do this you have to start your reply in the original thread, then copy/paste the quote markup (which includes a magic link to the post you are quoting) into the post new thread form. It would be interesting to make a forum with a "spin-off thread" feature, which would automate the placement of the reply in a new thread and a note in the old thread with a link to the new one. But in most cases this can't be automated because on better-managed forums once a digression has grown large enough to need a separate thread, the forum's moderators will move earlier posts about it (originally made in the first thread) to the new thread. (it might be interesting to make a forum that provides a way to have a post live in two different threads at the same time)
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To follow up on one of the suggestions Brett and Donald made, I think the best solution today for a modern discussion forum is Discourse <http://www.discourse.org/>. Discourse is built by some of the same people who built Stack Overflow, including Jeff Atwood <http://blog.codinghorror.com/civilized-discourse-construction-kit/>. Among the many excellent features <http://www.discourse.org/about/> it has is full support for a “mailing list mode”, where you can reply to and start new conversations entirely via email. That may be important for people who are not interested in using the web for their conversations. Discourse doesn’t currently have a voting plugin, but here is an interesting discussion about adding one <https://meta.discourse.org/t/feature-to-allow-uservoice-getsatisfaction-sugg...>. Just earlier today a member of the Discourse team followed-up on that discussion with a detailed proposal to make the plugin real <https://meta.discourse.org/t/plugin-feature-voting-separated-from-likes/3877...> . As an example of the polish Discourse already has, consider this remark by Random832: It would be interesting to make a forum with a “spin-off thread” feature, which would automate the placement of the reply in a new thread and a note in the old thread with a link to the new one. If you look at the post I linked to about adding a voting plugin <https://meta.discourse.org/t/plugin-feature-voting-separated-from-likes/3877...>, you can see just this kind of link offered by Discourse since the poster spun that new thread from an existing one. A large open source community using Discourse today is Docker <https://forums.docker.com/>. If Donald sets up a Discourse instance for Packaging, that should serve as a good trial for us to deploy it elsewhere. I suspect it will be a success. As for hosting, there are many options <https://meta.discourse.org/t/becoming-the-new-standard-discussion-tool-for-o...> that range from free but self-managed, to fully managed for a monthly fee. Nick On Sat, Jan 30, 2016 at 10:50 AM Random832 <random832@fastmail.com> wrote:
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Oooh, Discourse looks and sounds good. Hopefully we can opt out from voting, everything else looks just right. I recommend requesting some PSF money for a fully-hosted instance, so nobody has to suffer when it's down, security upgrades will be taken care of, etc. On Sat, Jan 30, 2016 at 8:48 AM, Nicholas Chammas <nicholas.chammas@gmail.com> wrote:
-- --Guido van Rossum (python.org/~guido)
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Yeah, the voting is just a plugin which I presume you can enable or disable as desired. As for hosting, I agree it’s probably better to have someone else do that so we can lessen the burden on our infra team. The Discourse team also offers discounted hosting for open source projects <https://meta.discourse.org/t/becoming-the-new-standard-discussion-tool-for-o...>. Depending on the arrangement they offer, it may be really cheap for us even with a fully managed instance. Nick On Sat, Jan 30, 2016 at 12:25 PM Guido van Rossum <guido@python.org> wrote:
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Honestly, It’s probably not super hard for us to get this running (and we might want to so we can piggyback on our Fastly CDN and such). Assuming it stores all of it’s persistent state inside of PostgreSQL then we’re already running a central PostgreSQL server that we keep backed up. The biggest issue comes from software that wants to store persistent state on disk, since that makes it difficult to treat those machines as empehereal.
----------------- Donald Stufft PGP: 0x6E3CBCE93372DCFA // 7C6B 7C5D 5E2B 6356 A926 F04F 6E3C BCE9 3372 DCFA
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Agreed. If you read through that thread about Discourse hosting for open source projects, you'll see that Jeff made a point of stressing just how easy it is to manage a Discourse instance. Still, my bias is to delegate where possible, even if the task is light, to reduce the psychological burden of being responsible for something. Then again, I'm not on the Python infra team, so I can't speak for them. If they're (and I'm guessing you're part of the team, Donald?) OK with it, then sure, it should be fine to manage the instance ourselves. Nick On Sat, Jan 30, 2016 at 12:59 PM Donald Stufft <donald@stufft.io> wrote:
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I've started a thread amongst python-ideas-owners to see if any of us can lead the eval between HyperKitty and Discourse and making sure PSF infra is okay with hosting it (or just paying for hosting). If none of us have time I will come back to the list to ask for someone to lead the evaluation. On Sat, 30 Jan 2016 at 10:07 Nicholas Chammas <nicholas.chammas@gmail.com> wrote:
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And importantly, with a PSF mailing list or PSF bug tracker or PSF code review system, etc., collaboration with the rest of the group doesn’t require an account with some particular organisation not accountable to PSF. A quick comment on this, in case anyone thinks Discourse falls in this category. Discourse the forum software is 100% open source <https://github.com/discourse/discourse>. We can run our own instance on our own hardware, or we can have someone else run it for us (like the Discourse team themselves). And identity is pluggable, so we can have something like id.python.org be the identity provider for our Discourse instance, regardless of where it’s hosted. Discourse is not like Google Groups where a company we don’t control can decide to shut down our forum service, or where we are forced to create accounts with a third-party in order to hold discussions. Every piece of Discourse would be completely under our control. Random832 is right: you need some kind of voting to have forum-curated reputations. A quick distinction here: Voting, at least on Discourse, will be a separate plugin <https://meta.discourse.org/t/plugin-feature-voting-separated-from-likes/3877...> intended to let people do things like vote on proposals. Reputation — or, as Discourse calls it, trust levels — is its own thing, and comes built in to Discourse <https://meta.discourse.org/t/what-do-user-trust-levels-do/4924>. Similar to how Stack Overflow works, as you gain trust within the community, new abilities become unlocked. For example, users at trust level 0 <https://meta.discourse.org/t/what-do-user-trust-levels-do/4924/3?u=nicholasc...> (i.e. brand new users) cannot send private messages to other users and cannot add attachments to their posts. These defaults are configurable by the forum admin. As they participate in the community, their trust level goes up and formerly-locked abilities become available <https://meta.discourse.org/t/what-do-user-trust-levels-do/4924/7?u=nicholasc...> . People who have been around for ages and who are already trusted can be manually promoted to the highest trust level <https://meta.discourse.org/t/what-do-user-trust-levels-do/4924/7?u=nicholasc...>, which effectively makes them forum moderators. If this sounds interesting to you, I recommend reading through the Discourse trust levels <https://meta.discourse.org/t/what-do-user-trust-levels-do/4924?u=nicholascha...> to get a good sense of how Discourse views community building. It’s really well thought out, IMO, and is informed by the authors’ experience building Stack Overflow. Nick On Sat, Jan 30, 2016 at 8:30 PM Stephen J. Turnbull <stephen@xemacs.org> wrote:
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To be clear, I'm not on python-dev and am not advocating we replace that list with Discourse. I'm just making the case for why Discourse would be a good candidate for the other discussion venues we've been talking about in this thread (e.g. packaging, python-ideas), where people are open to trying out a new medium. The basic idea is that investing in a better medium and better tooling fosters better discussions, which benefits Python the community and ultimately also Python the code base. I wouldn't call that a circus activity. But then again, I'm relatively new to the Python community; perhaps most people on here find this kind of meta-discussion unproductive. On Sun, Jan 31, 2016 at 10:48 AM Stefan Krah <skrah.temporarily@gmail.com> wrote:
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On Sun, 31 Jan 2016 at 08:19 Nicholas Chammas <nicholas.chammas@gmail.com> wrote:
It should happen on occasion, just not regularly. :) Keeping an open source project running is part technical, part social (which makes it part political :). That social bit means having to occasionally evaluate how we are managing our communication amongst not just long-time participants but also new ones. This means we have to sometimes look at what kids in university are using in order to entice them to participate (heck, even high school at this rate). For instance, Barry has mentioned NNTP as part of his solution to managing his mail relating to Python. But go into any university around the world and ask some CS student, "what is Usenet?" -- let alone NNTP -- and it's quite possible you will get a blank stare. This is why I don't call it comp.lang.python anymore but python-list@python.org (same goes for IRC, but it's probably known a lot more widely than Usenet). 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. Toss in people's principled stances on open source and it leads to a heated discussion. For instance, people have said they don't want to set up another account. But people forget that *every* mailing list on mail.python.org requires its own account to post (I personally have near a bazillion at this point). And while the archives and gmane give you anonymous access to read without an account, so does Discourse or any of the other solutions being discussed (no one wants to wall off the archives or make it so we can't keep a hold of our data in case of another move). It's the usual issue of having to get down to the root of the issue as to why people would want to stay with the mailing list vs. why others would want to switch to Discourse. Finding out the fundamental reasons and taking out the emotion of the discussion is usually the key to helping solve this sort of grounded discussion (at which point you can start ignoring those who can't remove the emotion). And in the case of people worrying about bifurcating the discussions, the python-ideas mailing list would simply be shut down to new email and its archive left up to prevent a split in audience if we do end up changing things up.
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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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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 <https://meta.discourse.org/t/discourse-as-a-front-end-for-existing-asf-maili...> on Discourse Meta around a year ago. In short, I think the answer that came out from that discussion is (quoting <https://meta.discourse.org/t/discourse-as-a-front-end-for-existing-asf-maili...> 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:
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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 On Sun, Jan 31, 2016 at 4:11 PM Nicholas Chammas <nicholas.chammas@gmail.com> wrote:
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Nicholas Chammas <nicholas.chammas@...> writes:
You are really getting on a soapbox here while having no clue at all about basic mailing list etiquette like a) not top posting b) not full quoting the entire thread c) properly quoting your predecessors. I guess we'll see more of that once the move to discourse has happened. Stefan Krah
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On Jan 31, 2016, at 5:03 PM, Stefan Krah <skrah.temporarily@gmail.com> wrote:
c) properly quoting your predecessors.
Which is ironic, given that you incorrectly quoted Nicholas and half of the message isn’t quoted at all though it should be. Perhaps it’d be a lot more welcoming if we didn’t scold people for “mailing list etiquette” when the various email clients make it pretty easy to accidentally mess it up. ----------------- Donald Stufft PGP: 0x6E3CBCE93372DCFA // 7C6B 7C5D 5E2B 6356 A926 F04F 6E3C BCE9 3372 DCFA
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On Sun, Jan 31, 2016 at 5:04 PM Stefan Krah skrah.temporarily@gmail.com <http://mailto:skrah.temporarily@gmail.com> wrote: a) not top posting b) not full quoting the entire thread Sorry, by default Gmail hides the thread when replying so it’s easy to forget that you are re-mailing the whole thing out. So normally you would not even notice that someone has top posted or quoted the entire thread if you’re reading on Gmail’s web client. Chalk it up to my being a mailing list n00b. I hope you also recognize that this particular piece of mailing list etiquette arose in a time where people did not have nice tooling to do the work for them, which is part of the point of this discussion. c) properly quoting your predecessors. OK, did I do it right this time? I guess we’ll see more of that once the move to discourse has happened. No such move has been agreed upon as far as I can tell, but if I may continue on my “soap box” and repeat what I’ve said earlier: I think Discourse will make etiquette *easier* to follow by taking care of repetitive tasks like this for people, instead of requiring that everyone independently remember to do X, Y, and Z every time they post. If you disagree, it would be good to hear why so we can discuss the root issue. And for the record: I’m really taken aback by how cynical your comments are, and I apologize for ticking you off. I’ll do a better job of following mailing list etiquette going forward. Nick
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Nicholas Chammas <nicholas.chammas@...> writes:
That's okay, but perhaps your tools aren't as good as you think.
Have you actually *used* Gnus, mutt, slrn or even gmane.org? You are again stating things with great certainty while I don't think you know the subject.
OK, did I do it right this time?
No, try replying to one of your own posts on gmane.org and you'll see.
You don't need to: Any of the above options does it automatically.
It's not about the etiquette: If you come in here and tell us that our tools are inferior, expect some pushback. I for example think that http://try.discourse.org/ looks cluttered and distracting. Stefan Krah
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On Sun, Jan 31, 2016 at 6:06 PM Stefan Krah <skrah.temporarily@gmail.com> wrote:
I haven't used those tools. It would be enlightening if you explained how they can address the issues we've been discussing in this thread. That is what we're discussing here, after all--improving how we discuss things. I've done my part by explaining the potential benefits that Discourse can offer us in great detail, because that's what I know. Regarding "stating things with great certainty", I'm not sure what you're referring to. I made some arguments, quoted people, and linked to stuff. Not sure what my crime is there. And my quote about "the older generations of developers" -- which you sneered at earlier with the "soap box" comment -- I explicitly prefaced with: "I'll also offer this conjecture: ..."
OK, did I do it right this time?
No, try replying to one of your own posts on gmane.org and you'll see.
I'm not sure what I'm supposed to see on gmane.org. I can see that this thread is on there, but I can't find the most recent messages. The way I am quoting you now is: I am hitting "Reply" in Gmail, clearing out older parts of the thread, and replying inline to what you wrote. It's pretty simple. If that's still not correct then I'm not sure how to satisfy you. All I can say is that I think it would be better if we had a way to solve mundane issues like this centrally, instead of pushing the responsibility onto each list user to piece together their own toolchain or workflow for doing the right thing.
Are Gnus, mutt, and slrn client-side tools? If they are, then we are pushing this responsibility onto every list user to find and use these tools correctly. You also mentioned being able to respond to mail via gmane.org. Is that the standard way everyone is expected to interact with the list? If not, then you have the same problem. Having a modern, web-based forum like Discourse which takes care of repetitive tasks like this centrally means everyone on the forum automatically has it taken care of. It's part of the interface of the forum, and everyone is using the same interface. Discourse's UX is good enough that in many cases the user *can't* or is *extremely unlikely* to do the wrong thing when it comes to mundane, routine things like quoting people, replying, etc. I think that's great.
I don't think I've bashed anyone's tools on here as "inferior". My discussion has been limited to Discourse vs. mailing lists. As you yourself stated, I clearly don't know about tools like Gnus, mutt, and so forth, and I'm not going to bash something I don't know. I *have* been arguing that a modern web-based forum solves common discussion issues in a way that mailing lists cannot match. But I think my arguments have been dispassionate and have not involved disparaging any tools out there as "inferior". As for "coming in here", I guess you're telling me that I'm an outsider. Sure. And as for "pushback", I would make a distinction between pushback that is substantive in nature and focused on the problem at hand, and simple derision. They don't belong in the same category. I for example think that http://try.discourse.org/ looks cluttered
and distracting.
Finally! An actual discussion of Discourse. And in this case, I agree with you. I've gotten more accustomed to the layout over time, but I do remember being overwhelmed when I first discovered Discourse. I'd bet there are options to change the layout and reduce visual noise, but I don't know. Nick
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On Feb 01, 2016, at 01:59 AM, Nicholas Chammas wrote:
I *have* been arguing that a modern web-based forum solves common discussion issues in a way that mailing lists cannot match.
And yet, web based forums come with their own limitations and problems. I won't outline all of my complaints about things like Gmail and other such web-based solutions because they'll likely devolve into the general issue with all of our communication mediums: it is a highly religious argument. I have workflows and tools I use to efficiently engage in discussions with open source communities. They aren't perfect, but they are damn good and very comfortable. You have or prefer different tools and workflows that make your engagement more fun and productive. Are yours wrong and mine right? Or vice versa? Of course not! There's always going to be a conflict between status quo and change, and in general I think that's healthy. It's important for new arrivals to try to understand why there's so much passion in the status quo, and it's good for old-timers to be challenged now and then. I think success depends on balance and evolution rather than revolution. In any case, all this is very interesting, but kind of pointless until and unless people take ownership and responsibility for implementing something different. Take a good look at what Brett is doing to migrate us to git. It doesn't matter if I disagree with his choices, he's going to do the very hard work of actually making it happen, bridge the gap between evolution and revolution, and be the guy who ensures all the kinks are smoothed out. And that's the only way it will work -- kudo to him and the other folks who will be making this happen. Such changes are not short-term commitments, but I encourage those who really want to see a change in how we communicate, to figure out how to make that happen. As I've said, for the part that interests me, I will work with anybody who wants to make Mailman 3 and Discourse work better together. Cheers, -Barry
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On 1/31/2016 6:06 PM, Stefan Krah wrote:
I for example think that http://try.discourse.org/ looks cluttered and distracting.
I had the opposite experience. All I see, with Firefox, is a blank page -- even after accepting cookies and temporarily allowing at least one google spyscript. Please let us not move our infrastructure to a finicky spyscript cookie monster site. As near as I can tell, bugs.python.org sets 1 cookie per session, which expires at the end of each session, and does not try to run *any* any foreign scripts. -- Terry Jan Reedy
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On Mon, Feb 1, 2016 at 9:30 AM, Nicholas Chammas <nicholas.chammas@gmail.com> wrote:
Yeah, Gmail can be a pain. But it's good in so many other ways that I keep using it. A couple of tips: 1) Turn off Rich Text by default, and if ever you see it active, turn it off for that email. It's a lot easier to make sure you're quoting properly etc when the email is in plain text mode. 2) If you're replying to just part of the message, you should be able to highlight that part and click in the Reply box. (That might require a config option - been ages since I set this up.) There'll be a couple of blank lines at the top, but you can either delete or ignore them, and just hit Ctrl-End to start typing underneath (or insert text in between different blocks). 3) To reply to the whole message, hit R or click in the box - and then press Ctrl-A to "select all". This instantly expands out the quoted text, making it easy to see what's worth trimming. And either because of Monty Python or because of it being one of the two hardest problems in computing, I said "a couple" and gave three. Whatever. :) ChrisA
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On 01/31/2016 02:03 PM, Stefan Krah wrote:
b) not full quoting the entire thread
Do you mean something like quoting an entire PEP when responding to only one or two lines of it, or do you mean keeping everything from the first email through all the replies so we have 15 levels of indentation? `Cause frankly, both those suck, and many long time users here are guilty of it. So why don't you lay off the personality war, and have an honest discussion of the idea. -- ~Ethan~
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On Jan 31, 2016, at 13:53, Nicholas Chammas <nicholas.chammas@gmail.com> wrote:
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.
And, from a later message:
I *have* been arguing that a modern web-based forum solves common discussion issues in a way that mailing lists cannot match.
A modern forum can definitely be much better out-of-the-box than a mailing list and traditional mail tools. But a suite of mail tools configured over many years for one user's idiosyncratic needs can outdo anything general-purpose. And that's not even considering the fact that the oldster has adapted to his mail tools, just as much as he's adapted them to his needs, and would have to adapt again to anything new. Compare the case with text editors. For me, Emacs is much better than some new editor like Atom. But for a novice, I'd definitely suggest Atom over Emacs (even Aquamacs). The difference here is that I can use Emacs while you use Atom, and we won't even notice we're using different tools; if I want to use email while you use Discourse, it seems unavoidable that one of us is going to be participating as a second-class citizen. You're effectively forcing me (and, more importantly, some core devs) to change. You're not going to convince Stefan that he's wrong for preferring mailing lists, because he's _not_ wrong. You may, however, convince him that the overall benefit (helping bring in new blood, providing PSF-owned permalinks, etc.) is worth the cost to him.
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On Monday, February 1, 2016 at 11:38:51 AM UTC+5:30, Andrew Barnert via Python-ideas wrote:
[Since you mentioned emacs...] Things can get bitrotten and worse simply by passage of time Here's my mail to emacs list about python mode(s) that seems to be getting brokener and brokener by the day http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/help-gnu-emacs/2016-01/msg00372.html
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On Feb 01, 2016, at 05:22 AM, Rustom Mody wrote:
You might have better luck with https://gitlab.com/python-mode-devs/python-mode Cheers, -Barry
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On Mon, Feb 1, 2016 at 1:08 AM Andrew Barnert <abarnert@yahoo.com> wrote:
Yes, at some level there has to be a compromise between the needs of the established developers, and the needs of new contributors, as Brett explained in an earlier email. As a newbie, I'm not in a position to understand how to strike that balance; all I can do is argue for the side I understand best.
You're not going to convince Stefan that he's wrong for preferring mailing lists, because he's _not_ wrong.
I haven't said and wouldn't say that anyone is "wrong" for using tools that work for them. That's preposterous. This isn't a case of "You're *gonna* use Discourse and *you're gonna like it*!" Come on, is that really the message you got out of my writing? :) I've been making the case that Discourse can benefit newcomers and hopefully also the overall community by solving common problems better than other tools do. The focus is on what works better in the general case for most people. That's not to say that someone can't have figured out a better solution for themselves. The question is whether we want to expect everyone to arrive at the same solution, or give them something better out of the box. Nick
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On 31.01.2016 22:11, Nicholas Chammas wrote:
Jeff's reply doesn't sound overly optimistic. If the only way to get Discourse working for python-ideas (or any other PSF mailing list) is to *switch* to it, I'm firmly -1 on that approach. Forums are nice for things like Stack Overflow which are focusing more on questions and answer, with just a single linear thread being active going from the question to the answer. For discussions, which often branch in multiple sub-threads and don't necessarily start with a clear questions and final answers, I find mailing lists much more practical and closer to real life discussions in groups. Mailing list discussion "features" like being able to overhear something in another thread and the jumping in to participate should not be underestimated either. I know that other tools have grown bridges between the UI client world and serial line communication protocols, e.g. Slack and IRC, which works reasonably well. If we could make that happen, I'd be +1 on giving Discourse a try in order to invite new input from people who prefer the forum style UI approach. PS: I've added some extra quoting chars to your reply. HTML emails don't work well for mailing lists - better use plain text to start with, so that the context is not lost when an email client or archiver converts messages to plain text :-) -- Marc-Andre Lemburg eGenix.com Professional Python Services directly from the Experts (#1, Feb 01 2016)
::: We implement business ideas - efficiently in both time and costs ::: eGenix.com Software, Skills and Services GmbH Pastor-Loeh-Str.48 D-40764 Langenfeld, Germany. CEO Dipl.-Math. Marc-Andre Lemburg Registered at Amtsgericht Duesseldorf: HRB 46611 http://www.egenix.com/company/contact/ http://www.malemburg.com/
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On Mon, 1 Feb 2016 at 00:12 M.-A. Lemburg <mal@egenix.com> wrote:
I don't quite understand how any of that is exclusive to a mailing list? If a forum has thread topics which are clearly marked with new content since the last time you visited then how is that any different then a threaded email client that tells you have new mail on that thread?
I guess what we need is someone who is going to want to stay on the email-based side of things to look at the feature set of Discourse and let us know whether its feature set is adequate, or if not what is falls short of. And I have not heard what HyperKitty offers either.
That assumes you can even do that, e.g., I use Google Inbox and there is no plain text option. I'm afraid this is an example of the OSS community trying to swim against the stream where the rest of the world has moved on and it is slowly making it harder to get new people to participate in OSS. -Brett
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1) I like the current development of Python to be more community-friendly and visible! Big thanks to Brett (github). +1 Another step will definitely involve a more modern discussion structure. 2) Just give it a try and don't discuss so much about it. Too much bikeshedding. As Brett said, it's social. So, everybody is right of course. ;) 3) Nobody says its mandatory. Have several channels is perfectly fine. 4) Learning new things is great. Some guys here might think email is the best thing since sliced bread. No! It is not. Not saying Discourse is better, but it has definitely more visibility and a more modern UI (well, it actually HAS an UI). Everything else remains to be seen. If you want fresh blood, visibility counts. Best, Sven
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On 01.02.2016 19:02, Brett Cannon wrote:
I was referring to the standard feature of email clients to display the threads in a tree which shows the subthreads. I haven't seen such a feature in Discourse. Some forums and gmane use indentation to a similar effect. The way Discourse handles replies to in-thread postings is also a bit strange, since the replies to messages are shown both under the parent message and in the chronological order (i.e. twice): https://community.lsst.org/t/understanding-and-using-discourses-flat-threadi... See e.g. https://community.lsst.org/t/preparing-the-dm-update-for-scientists-session/... for an example. Forking off new topics inside a thread breaks the threading as well. In email you simply change the subject line.
I had already posted a few links to people summarizing their experience.
Gmail sends both plain text and HTML, so this is not much of an issue. Mailman will pick the plain text for archiving. The formatting problems only occur when a mail client only sends HTML which then has to be converted to plain text by Mailman or other mail clients. Features such as indentation or highlighting in different colors are often lost in this conversion. Anyway, this whole discussion is way off-topic for the mailing list and I haven't really seen a compelling argument for switching away from mailing lists completely yet, though several who would like to see both the mailing list and a Discourse like client for people who prefer web UI and forum style discussions. I'd suggest to postpone any decision until better tools are available to make this happen. Email is not going to go away, but I certainly have seen a lot of other communication tools come and go - and I bet there's something to learn in that :-) -- Marc-Andre Lemburg eGenix.com Professional Python Services directly from the Experts (#1, Feb 01 2016)
::: We implement business ideas - efficiently in both time and costs ::: eGenix.com Software, Skills and Services GmbH Pastor-Loeh-Str.48 D-40764 Langenfeld, Germany. CEO Dipl.-Math. Marc-Andre Lemburg Registered at Amtsgericht Duesseldorf: HRB 46611 http://www.egenix.com/company/contact/ http://www.malemburg.com/
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On Mon, 1 Feb 2016 at 11:23 M.-A. Lemburg <mal@egenix.com> wrote:
I don't think that is as standard as you think. I know for a fact that Gmail and Inbox don't have a tree view, and based on searches I don't think Yahoo or Hotmail/Outlook support it either. I also know for a fact that Outlook (web or desktop) don't support a tree view. All of them only support a conversation view where emails that part of the same conversation end up in a serialized thread of email (so you can think of it as a tree view of depth 2: folder and then conversation). The only place I have come across a tree view for email is in some desktop email clients and terminal-based ones which I'm willing to bet are not the way the majority of people read their email these days.
Yes, but what I'm talking about is someone who knows how the Python community has historically worked to write their own summary instead of asking all of us to read a bunch of separate summaries. Consider it a literature review or a summary of summaries. :)
I disagree with that. As I said in my reply to Nick Chammas, we occasionally need to re-evaluate our choice in tooling to make sure we are not ignoring improvements made in the wider world that we are ignoring. And this becomes especially important if the way we manage our communication becomes an impediment to people newcomers because the ramp-up costs are too high for what becomes a "unique" requirement we impose on others.
This whole discussion kicked off when the point was brought up that having some way to infer reputation would be useful. If it was obvious who on this list consistently posts in an off-topic fashion, then new people would know that they should probably ignore those people's emails until they are more familiar with the mailing lists. We have persistently had this problem where long-time subscribers know who to mute and thus spare themselves a lot of time and anguish with poor actors, while new people have no idea and then engage people in conversations that go nowhere.
As I have said before, this switch won't happen until someone takes up an evaluation to properly show what we would gain or lose from a switch to something like Discourse or HyperKitty.
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On 01.02.2016 21:05, Brett Cannon wrote:
Brett, I understand where you are coming from, but I don't follow the ramp-up costs argument. What we should be after is better signal-to-noise ratio. Changing ramp-up costs doesn't necessarily correlate with this.
This is something good moderators should know how to handle. I don't think technology is good at such social interactions. Such voting features often result in shy people who are really knowledgeable to stay away from discussions simply because they are afraid to get poor scores.
Fair enough. We can continue the discussion when that happens :-) -- Marc-Andre Lemburg eGenix.com Professional Python Services directly from the Experts (#1, Feb 01 2016)
::: We implement business ideas - efficiently in both time and costs ::: eGenix.com Software, Skills and Services GmbH Pastor-Loeh-Str.48 D-40764 Langenfeld, Germany. CEO Dipl.-Math. Marc-Andre Lemburg Registered at Amtsgericht Duesseldorf: HRB 46611 http://www.egenix.com/company/contact/ http://www.malemburg.com/
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On 2 February 2016 at 06:05, Brett Cannon <brett@python.org> wrote:
HyperKitty isn't a switch - it's the native web gateway that becomes available by way of upgrading to Mailman 3. The MM3 upgrade is worth doing for a whole host of reasons independently of gaining access to HyperKitty (e.g. one account per user with optional per-list subscription settings, rather than the MM2 model of user settings being stored independently for each list). If Mark is willing to shepherd an MM3 upgrade on a volunteer basis, that would be excellent, but I also expect it to be a fair bit of work. Cheers, Nick. -- Nick Coghlan | ncoghlan@gmail.com | Brisbane, Australia
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On Feb 01, 2016, at 06:02 PM, Brett Cannon wrote:
Or alternatively, an 800lb gorilla deciding what is best for everyone --even those not using its tools-- and ignoring decades of interoperability and standards, slowly making it less fun for long-time contributors to continue to participate. <wink> Cheers, -Barry
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On Thu, Feb 4, 2016, at 14:46, Barry Warsaw wrote:
There's no singular 800lb gorilla pushing the trend towards HTML mail. There's the fact that real users want to be able to use font styles, inline images, and tables, and anyone who wanted that to be handled via something other than HTML (text/enriched or whatever) has *completely* dropped the ball. (I don't regularly post here, but I've written this response in HTML on general principle)
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On Fri, Feb 5, 2016 at 7:27 AM, Random832 <random832@fastmail.com> wrote:
Sure, nobody's pushing for PDF Emails or anything like that. But it's not that hard to use a bit of casual text markup instead of actual font styles; and honestly, the number of times tables/images/etc are used well is utterly dwarfed by the number of times they're used uselessly. Epitomizing the inanity of a lot of people's email usage is one person I know who will reply-all to a long post, quoting the whole thing, and top-posting a "Thanks!" with a signature attached. That's the entire content of the post, but it has a whole lot of color and formatting and stuff. If text-only emails lose us that kind of thing at the cost of also losing us the occasional inline image, I'm okay with that price. ChrisA
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On Thursday, February 4, 2016 2:22 PM, Chris Angelico <rosuav@gmail.com> wrote:
On the other hand, I occasionally have to deal with a guy who used to wRITE aLL hIS tEXT lIKE tHIS fOR sOME rEASON, but since he discovered HTML mail, he now instead uses tons of bizarre formatting with normal capitalization. I can just view as plain text and his mail is perfectly readable. But he doesn't _know_ it's readable, so presumably the voices in his head are satisfied.
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For what it's worth, my interest in starting this thread was, as a new participant to the list: - already overwhelmed by the frequency of emails - archives are difficult to search for relevant previous conversations - it's hard to observe agreement, but easy to observe disagreement - it's hard to observe the opinions of decision-makers - the last response in a conversation can feel like the consensus, creating an incentive to "get the last word" by repeating oneself, by writing in a style that discourages response, or by speaking on a different aspect of the topic without direct response (as I suppose I am doing here) The reason I latched onto Sjoerd's question of whether he had the right to say "+1" was to highlight the issue of observing agreement, especially the agreement of folks who can change the language. I'm not interested in a voting system for the purpose of having a vote, but so I can see who has been convinced of what, what clout they have, and whether another message is useful. On Sun, Jan 31, 2016, 2:21 PM Ben Finney <ben+python@benfinney.id.au> wrote:
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On Mon, Feb 1, 2016 at 5:00 PM, Michael Selik <mike@selik.org> wrote:
It's worth noting that important decisions don't usually get made on -ideas alone. If something's controversial and needs a lot of what you're saying is hard to observe, it probably merits a PEP - the current state of consensus or disagreement can be detailed in a stand-alone editable document, rather than depending on mail archives. ChrisA
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On Jan 31, 2016, at 06:27 PM, Brett Cannon wrote:
Which is too bad because NNTP is a pretty decent protocol, apart from any historical connection to Usenet.
Which will go away as we start to migrate to Mailman 3. Sadly, one of the more interesting SSO approaches was Persona which Mozilla has EOLd. There are ongoing discussions on how best to replace that. At worst, you'll have a single login per MM3 installation. Maybe you'll be able to use something else like a OpenID/Google/FB or other login but you won't be able to rely on Persona to provide a verified email address on first login. Cheers, -Barry
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Stefan Krah <skrah.temporarily@...> writes:
It does not sound interesting at all -- Python development is increasingly turning into a circus, with fewer and fewer people actually writing code.
An interesting metric is to compute how much the set of posters on this "meta" thread intersects the set of the most active developers: $ hg churn -c -d "2015 to 2016" storchaka@gmail.com 1142 ************************************* victor.stinner@gmail.com 803 ************************** benjamin@python.org 582 ******************* yselivanov@sprymix.com 441 ************** tjreedy@udel.edu 394 ************* steve.dower@microsoft.com 302 ********** berker.peksag@gmail.com 285 ********* python@rcn.com 265 ********* zachary.ware@gmail.com 236 ******** vadmium+py@gmail.com 220 ******* larry@hastings.org 158 ***** nad@acm.org 121 **** rdmurray@bitdance.com 113 **** rbtcollins@hp.com 106 *** [...] (of course this is not entirely fair, since some people like Donald are quite active in other related areas) Regards Antoine.
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Arguably changes like this are not primarily to benefit the people who are already contributing, those people have already decided that the current tooling isn't enough of a deterence to not contribute, but either allow new people to more easily contribute (in this case, via discussion) or people who are small time contributors to contribute more often. Of course, you don't want to ignore the people who are already contributing or make a decision solely focused on trying to attract new contributors (or increase contributions from small time contributors) since you run the risk of alienating the folks currently doing most of the work and then not getting any new contributions anyways. More to the topic at hand, I think the mailing list interface is kind of crummy and relies on people hand tailoring a bunch of filters to make it in any way reasonable. I have no idea if discourse or mailman3 is any better or if they are just differently bad, though on the packaging side of things I'd love to at least experiment with discourse since I think the *idea* of it is very nice, but no idea how it works in practice. There was a post earlier on about someone's experience with using discourse entirely in the "pretend it's a mailing list" mode and there were some pretty decent flaws, which is kind of disheartening. ----------------- Donald Stufft PGP: 0x6E3CBCE93372DCFA // 7C6B 7C5D 5E2B 6356 A926 F04F 6E3C BCE9 3372 DCFA
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Nicholas Chammas wrote:
If such a move were made, some kind of email or usenet gateway would be an *essential* feature for me to continue participating. I don't have enough time or energy to chase down multiple web forums every day and wrestle with their clunky interfaces. One of the usenet groups I used to follow (rec.arts.int-fiction) is now effectively dead since everyone abandoned it for a web forum that I can't easily follow. I'd be very sad if anything like that happened to the main Python groups. -- Greg
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On Sat, Jan 30, 2016 at 12:47:43AM -0800, Ian Lee wrote:
I think any talk of migrating away from email is greatly premature. The Mailman folks have done a lot of fantastic work with Mailman 3 and Hyperkitty, which will bring many of the benefits of a web forum to the mailing lists. We should at least look at Hyperkitty before planning any widespread move away from email. http://wiki.list.org/HyperKitty -- Steve
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On Sat, Jan 30, 2016 at 12:47:43AM -0800, Ian Lee wrote:
-1 in general. For existing channels, parallel operation, probably with a gateway, is essential.
for example python-ideas?
-1 in particular. There are better candidates for experimentation.
Steven D'Aprano writes:
I think any talk of migrating away from email is greatly premature.
+1 (but I'm a contributor to the GNU Mailman project, so take that with a grain of self-interest).
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Guido van Rossum writes:
These can't be separated. Reputation is obtained by writing answers that people vote for. The site would either have to be structured to allow that, or an entirely different way of getting reputation... which would still involve voting on _something_, if it's to be decentralized and therefore "automatic" rather than requiring you personally to hand out all reputation points.
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On Jan 29, 2016, at 08:35 PM, Guido van Rossum wrote:
not everybody is a wizard at managing high volume mailing list traffic).
Which is why for me, Gmane is an indispensable tool, along with a decent NNTP client. I subscribe to python-ideas and python-dev so I can post them, but I nomail python-ideas (not yet python-dev) so my inbox doesn't get cluttered. Then I read the Gmane newsgroups and as this message shows, can easy post to threads I care about. I can kill-thread any I don't. Plus, I read them when I have time and can ignore them when I don't. I appreciate this isn't a solution for everyone, but it allows me to stay engaged on my own terms and not get overwhelmed by Python email traffic. Cheers, -Barry
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On Jan 29, 2016, at 07:03 PM, Steven D'Aprano wrote:
I'll just mention that if folks are interested i exploring a SO-like voting system for mailing list archives, you should get involved with the HyperKitty project. HK is the Django-based new archiver for Mailman 3, and the HK subproject is lead by the quite awesome Aurelien Bompard. A feature like this is on our radar, but you know, resources. https://gitlab.com/mailman/hyperkitty Cheers, -Barry
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On 01/29/2016 04:55 AM, Michael Selik wrote:
One defect of a mailing list is the difficulty of viewing a weighted average of opinions. The benefit is that anyone can voice an opinion. This is more like the Senate than the House -- Rhode Island appears (on paper) to have as much influence as California. Luckily, we have a form of President. I'm guessing a House occurs in a more private mode of communication?
I've read up a bit on Wikipedia, so I'll try to start summarizing the reference for the non-Americans who come after me. One part of the US government is the "Congress", which is divided into two "houses": the "Senate" and the House of Representatives (which, I assume, is *the* "House"). Members of the House correspond to "districts", which are determined by population (roughly, but the details seem irrelevant here) -- so each member of the House corresponds roughly to some fixed number of people. On the other hand, the Senate has two members for each "state", but states aren't determined by population: "Rhode Island" has many fewer people than "California". (Unsurprising, I might add: I never hear about Rhode Island, but California makes it to local news here at times.) There is also a "President", who doesn't seem to have as much power as Python's BDFL: he/she can veto decisions of the Congress, but that veto can in turn be overriden by the Congress. Trying to hold all these details in my head while thinking how they relate to mailing list discussions leaves me quite confused. Would it be possible to make the argument clearer to people who need to look these things up to understand it?
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Petr Viktorin writes:
On 01/29/2016 04:55 AM, Michael Selik wrote:
[a lot of en_US.legalese]
Would it be possible to make the argument clearer to people who need to look these things up to understand it?
I would just skip to the chase[1]:
Perhaps as the community gets larger, a system like StackOverflow might be a better tool for handling things like Python-Ideas.
I'm not sure what else is in s.o that he thinks would be helpful, the references to the American political system weren't very specific. Obviously a thumbs-up glyph for every post would make it simpler to say "+1", though. Footnotes: [1] Another American idiom.
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Petr Viktorin wrote:
Trying to hold all these details in my head while thinking how they relate to mailing list discussions leaves me quite confused.
I think Guido is more like the king of England was in the old days. His word is law, but if he pisses off his subjects too much, he risks either losing his head or being forced to sign a Magna Carta. -- Greg
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Two big problems with moving primary discussions off the mailing list are discoverablility and community fracture. Any new forum will mean another login, a new work flow, another slice of the ever diminishing attention pie, and discussions that occur both on the traditional site and the new site. Some people will miss the big announcement about the new forum. There will be lots of cross-posting because people won't know for sure which ones the people who need to be involved frequent. For example, many years ago I missed a discussion about something I cared about and only accidentally took notice when I saw a commit message in my inbox. When I asked about why the issue had never been mentioned on python-dev, I was told that everything was hashed out in great detail on the tracker. I didn't even realize that I wasn't getting email notifications of new tracker issues, so I never saw it until it was too late. I've seen other topics discussed primarily on G+, for which I have an account, but rarely pay attention too. I don't even know if it's still "a thing". Maybe everyone's moved to Slack by now. How many different channels do I have to engage with to keep track of what's happening in core Python? This isn't GOML and I'm all for experimentation, but I do urge caution. Otherwise we might just wonder why we haven't heard from Uncle Timmy in a while. Cheers, -Barry
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Two big problems with moving primary discussions off the mailing list are discoverablility and community fracture. Agreed, though consider: Community fracture is a always risk when changing the discussion medium. On balance, we have to consider whether the risk is outweighed by the benefits of a new medium. As for discoverability, let me make a brief case for why Discourse is head and shoulders above mailing lists. Among many well-designed features <http://www.discourse.org/about/>, Discourse has the following things going for it in the discoverability department: - You can mention people by @name from posts and they’ll get notified, like on GitHub. No need to wonder if people will miss something because they haven’t setup their email filters correctly. - We can unify the various lists under a single forum and separate discussions with categories. This would hopefully lend better to cross-pollination of discussions across different categories (e.g. ideas vs. dev), while still letting people narrow their focus to a single category if that’s what they want. For examples of how categories can be used, see Discourse Meta <https://meta.discourse.org/> and this category on the Docker forum <https://forums.docker.com/c/open-source-projects>. - People starting new posts on Discourse automatically get shown potentially related discussions, similar to what Stack Overflow does. It makes it much harder to miss or forget to look for prior discussions before starting a new one. Naturally, generalized search is also a first-class feature. - Regarding the potential proliferation of logins, Discourse supports single sign-on <https://meta.discourse.org/t/official-single-sign-on-for-discourse/13045>, so if we want we can let people login with Google, GitHub, or perhaps even a Python-owned identity provider. These features (and others <http://www.discourse.org/about/>) are really well-executed, as you would expect coming from Jeff Atwood and others who left Stack Overflow to create Discourse. Finally, as a web-based forum, Discourse takes the burden off of users having to each independently come up with a toolchain that makes things manageable for them. Solutions to common problems like notification, finding prior discussions, and so forth, are implemented centrally, and all users automatically benefit. It’s really hard to offer that with a mailing list. And to top it all off, if for whatever reason you hate web forums, Discourse has a “mailing list mode” which lets you respond to and start discussions entirely via email, without affecting the web-based forum. Nick On Sat, Jan 30, 2016 at 4:22 PM Donald Stufft <donald@stufft.io> wrote:
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On Jan 30, 2016, at 10:02 PM, Nicholas Chammas wrote:
As for discoverability, let me make a brief case for why Discourse is head and shoulders above mailing lists.
To be clear, I'm a fan of Discourse, and would be happy to see an id.python.org SSO'd instance of it for experimentation purposes. However, I would be really upset if major decisions were made in some Discourse thread. There's a reason why PEP 1 requires posting to python-dev, and specifies headers like Discussions-To, Post-History, and Resolution. Some features, which I'd call "tangential" to core language design do indeed happen elsewhere primarily. asyncio and the distutils-stack come to mind. And I think that's fine. But it's also important to post to python-dev at certain milestones or critical junctures because that's what *everyone* knows as the central place for coordinating development. Cheers, -Barry
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Barry Warsaw <barry@python.org> writes:
And importantly, with a PSF mailing list or PSF bug tracker or PSF code review system, etc., collaboration with the rest of the group doesn't require an account with some particular organisation not accountable to PSF. -- \ “The best way to get information on Usenet is not to ask a | `\ question, but to post the wrong information.” —Aahz | _o__) | Ben Finney
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Hi! On Sat, Jan 30, 2016 at 04:17:26PM -0500, Barry Warsaw <barry@python.org> wrote:
Or to gitter...
GOML? Get Off my Mailing List? ;-)
Oleg. -- Oleg Broytman http://phdru.name/ phd@phdru.name Programmers don't die, they just GOSUB without RETURN.
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To be clear, I’m a fan of Discourse, and would be happy to see an id.python.org SSO’d instance of it for experimentation purposes. +1 Perhaps Donald’s suggestion of starting a Discourse instance for Packaging is the easiest way to evaluate it and give people time to kick the tires and see what they think. I’m guessing that will be discussed on distutils-sig? (This is part of the problem of mailing lists vs. a unified forum. :-) Nick On Sat, Jan 30, 2016 at 6:19 PM Steven D'Aprano <steve@pearwood.info> wrote:
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On Sat, Jan 30, 2016 at 1:17 PM, Barry Warsaw <barry@python.org> wrote:
That might have been a lapse in judgement for that particular issue? Without the tracker we'd be utterly inundated in minutiae on python-dev. Occasionally I see folks redirecting a discussion from python-ideas or python-dev to the tracker, and vice versa, and in general I think the line is pretty clear there and people do the right thing. Honestly I wouldn't want to replace python-dev for decisions, but I know several core devs left python-ideas because it was too noisy for them, and I think plenty of stuff on python-ideas would be totally appropriate for some other forum (I often mute threads myself). My rule is that if something's PEP-worthy it needs to be mentioned on python-dev, even if most of the discussion is elsewhere (whether it's a dedicated SIG or a specific tracker on GitHub). It seems reasonable that python-dev should be involved early on, when the discussion is just starting, and again close to the end, before decisions are cast in stone. But I'm glad we don't have to do everything there.
I've seen other topics discussed primarily on G+, for which I have an account, but rarely pay attention too. I don't even know if it's still "a thing".
Fortunately, G+ is dead. "Social media" as it's now known just isn't a good place for these type of discussions.
Maybe everyone's moved to Slack by now. How many different channels do I have to engage with to keep track of what's happening in core Python?
A lot of stuff used to (or still does) happen in IRC, which (as you know) I utterly hate and can't stand. But chat systems still serve a purpose, and if people want to use them we can't stop them. But we can have a written standard for how to handle major decisions, and I see nothing wrong with the standards we currently have written up in PEP 1. I don't think whatever is being proposed here is going against those rules (remember you're reading this in python-ideas, not python-dev :-).
Tim seems to have great filters though -- whenever someone says "float" or "datetime" (or "farmville" :-) he perks up his ears. -- --Guido van Rossum (python.org/~guido)
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On Jan 30, 2016, at 04:09 PM, Guido van Rossum wrote:
I actually don't remember the details, just that it happened. But the fact that a lot of smaller details are discussed primarily or solely on the tracker is totally fine and all good! I think we do a much better job of advertising it now. Hopefully everyone knows that to stay involved at that level of detail, sign up for new-issue notifications and nosey yourself in on the topics you care about. Agreed with you about the rest of what you said, except perhaps for:
Yep. We have similar discussions internally. I actually don't mind IRC since I have a good client (bip + Emacs/ERC) and I do live on dozens of channels for work. It can get a little spammy at times, but I find them relatively effective at getting or giving focused, short-term help. IRC doesn't work as well for bigger collaborations. But IRC does have the advantage of being totally open and accessible via numerous clients, so information can't be too exclusive or owned. Cheers, -Barry
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Would it be possible to provide an integration of Mailman with Discourse ? I know that Discourse already provides quite a few mailing list like features, but there are still a few issues, which an integration like the existing NNTP gateway of Mailman could likely help resolve: https://meta.discourse.org/t/feedback-from-a-community-about-mailing-list-fe... Esp. the inline reply style (problem 4) mentioned there seems like a show stopper for the way we are used to working here and on other Python MLs. There already is a grant for improving Discourse for some of these things: https://meta.discourse.org/t/moss-roadmap-mailing-lists/36432 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. Cheers, -- Marc-Andre Lemburg eGenix.com Professional Python Services directly from the Experts (#1, Jan 31 2016)
::: We implement business ideas - efficiently in both time and costs ::: eGenix.com Software, Skills and Services GmbH Pastor-Loeh-Str.48 D-40764 Langenfeld, Germany. CEO Dipl.-Math. Marc-Andre Lemburg Registered at Amtsgericht Duesseldorf: HRB 46611 http://www.egenix.com/company/contact/ http://www.malemburg.com/
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On Jan 31, 2016, at 07:22 PM, M.-A. Lemburg wrote:
Would it be possible to provide an integration of Mailman with Discourse ?
Possible, I don't know, but on the wish list, yes! None of the core Mailman developers have time for this, but we would gladly help and work with anybody who wanted to look into this.
Definitely. Also note that we'd like to build NNTP and IMAP support into Mailman, again though it's lack of resources. If anybody wants to work on these areas, please contact us over in mailman-developers@python.org Cheers, -Barry
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On 31.01.2016 19:36, Barry Warsaw wrote:
Would this be something the PSF could help kickstart with a development grant ? -- Marc-Andre Lemburg eGenix.com Professional Python Services directly from the Experts (#1, Feb 01 2016)
::: We implement business ideas - efficiently in both time and costs ::: eGenix.com Software, Skills and Services GmbH Pastor-Loeh-Str.48 D-40764 Langenfeld, Germany. CEO Dipl.-Math. Marc-Andre Lemburg Registered at Amtsgericht Duesseldorf: HRB 46611 http://www.egenix.com/company/contact/ http://www.malemburg.com/
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On Sun, Jan 31, 2016 at 9:40 AM, Barry Warsaw <barry@python.org> wrote:
Maybe the software is totally open, but the community doesn't feel that way. hen I forayed into it briefly felt hostile to people who don't have the right personality to be online 24/7. -- --Guido van Rossum (python.org/~guido)
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Eh, I think IRC as a protocol tends to be hostile to people who can't have some method of being online 24/7 (even if it's via a bouncer and they aren't physically there). I think it's why you see more projects using things like Slack or gitter instead of IRC. You can sort of recreate some of this using log bots and/or bouncers and the like, but 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 think it is why you see so many people developing software on OS X that they plan to deploy to Linux, why you see people preferring GitHub over other solutions, why Slack over IRC, etc. ----------------- Donald Stufft PGP: 0x6E3CBCE93372DCFA // 7C6B 7C5D 5E2B 6356 A926 F04F 6E3C BCE9 3372 DCFA
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On Jan 31, 2016, at 01:54 PM, Donald Stufft wrote:
Eh, I think IRC as a protocol tends to be hostile to people who can't have some method of being online 24/7
I wouldn't say "hostile" but certainly not nearly as useful. On the flip side, I've heard complaints from Slack users (I'm not one myself) that they can get overwhelmed by notifications when they want to be "off the clock". Cheers, -Barry
participants (28)
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Andrew Barnert
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Antoine Pitrou
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Barry Warsaw
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Ben Finney
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Brett Cannon
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Chris Angelico
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Donald Stufft
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Ethan Furman
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Geoffrey Spear
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Greg Ewing
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Guido van Rossum
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Ian Lee
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Joao S. O. Bueno
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M.-A. Lemburg
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Michael Selik
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Mirmojtaba Gharibi
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Nicholas Chammas
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Nick Coghlan
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Oleg Broytman
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Petr Viktorin
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Random832
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Rustom Mody
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Sjoerd Job Postmus
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Stefan Krah
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Stephen J. Turnbull
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Steven D'Aprano
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Sven R. Kunze
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Terry Reedy