From mailing list to GitHub issues
I have been a subscriber only for few weeks now but I dont like the mailing list at all. First, I get all the topics even tho Windows encoding is not of my interest. Second, most of the text is auto quotes anyway. Third, editing posts can sometimes be helpful, for correcting typos and such. I think it would be beneficial to use GitHub issues instead, one for each topic and perhaps one for general notifications like announcing new topics or forum wide announcements. Unfortunately it seems that moving away from existing ways always meets with a lot of inertia. On the other hand, python is probably one of most actively developed langs around so maybe it is doable. I put my proposal on the forum floor to discuss. Cheers to all active participants.
To ease the struggle of pressing "Mark as read" every time an uninteresting email arrives, look for "Mute" button. In Gmail it's under "More" drop-down. Apart from that, I completely agree. Maybe not necessarily GitHub, but something similar that's not email lists. On Sat, Aug 13, 2016 at 9:31 PM, Arek Bulski <arek.bulski@gmail.com> wrote:
On Sun, Aug 14, 2016 at 12:31 AM, Arek Bulski <arek.bulski@gmail.com> wrote:
Strongly disagree. Yes, you have to cope with the topics you're not interested in, but a good email client will help you with that anyway. (In Gmail, for instance, "Mute this thread" does that for you.) You'd have to deal with that on *any* forum, so email is no different. GitHub Issues is *only* good for one purpose, and that is the management of one repository. You tried to start a general Python question on the PEPs repository, which isn't right. It emphasizes the PEP process as if it were the one and only way to discuss Python ideas, which it most certainly isn't - the vast majority of python-ideas threads don't result in PEPs. There are other places where discussion can happen, too. "BPO" (http://bugs.python.org/) is where changes to Python's core code end up - it might be moving to GitHub Issues, but if it does, it wouldn't be part of the PEPs repo, but part of the CPython repo. There's the python-dev mailing list, where a lot of traffic isn't specifically about changes to anything at all, but is about general policies and such. And python-list (aka comp.lang.python) also gets a lot of discussion, although you'd start a thread on python-list if you expect the answer to be more of "Here's how you can do that" than "Yes/no, we will/won't add that to the language". They're unlikely to shift to GitHub Issues. Ultimately, email is the best way that I've *ever* seen for discussing important matters like this. All the others (BPO, GH Issues, etc), and even social media (eg when Christine sends me a Twitter message), channel through to email - GitHub sends me an email any time an issue is created or commented on, etc. Every important discussion I've ever been involved with has been in one of my email inboxes, with the possible exception of real-time conversations - which then end up being ephemeral. The ONLY benefit you're stating for GH Issues is that it has per-topic notifications. Those would be broken the instant a discussion begins to wander, as you get the age-old problem of "is this a reply to that, or is it a new topic?" (answer: it's both), so I think you'd find the advantage over email isn't all that great anyway. Get Mozilla Thunderbird or Squirrel Mail or some other at least half-way decent mail client, and you should be able to cope with python-ideas. ChrisA
I don't have time to respond at length, but I would just like to mention that I'm actually pretty tired of email threads getting off the rails and wouldn't mind looking at other approaches, including possibly a dedicated GitHub tracker (*not* the cpython or peps repo's tracker). There are other possible solutions too, e.g. discourse or MailMan3 + HyperKitty. Like Chris, I live in my inbox and everything of importance must come through there or I won't know about it, but that doesn't imply to me that it's the best way to manage discussions. I frequently go to the website (e.g. GitHub, bugs.python.org, discourse) for a better UI to peruse and manage a discussion. A few projects I'm on have no mailing list, only GitHub trackers, and they seem to work well for a variety of purposes, including newbie help, bugs, philosophical discussions, and debates on the future shape of specific features. It takes away the whole "is this a bug or is it a feature" insecurity that many people have before posting to a tracker (often out of fear of annoying the developers) -- you just post to the tracker and someone will triage it, and your head won't be bitten off. That's all I have time for. On Sat, Aug 13, 2016 at 8:41 AM, Chris Angelico <rosuav@gmail.com> wrote:
-- --Guido van Rossum (python.org/~guido)
Hi! Let me completely disagree. On Sat, Aug 13, 2016 at 04:31:06PM +0200, Arek Bulski <arek.bulski@gmail.com> wrote:
The advantages of email: -- Push technology: it's delivered to my mailbox and I don't need to visit the discussion site. -- I can filter incoming messages and deliver them to whatever mailboxes I prefer. -- I can read it in any interface I prefer -- there are mail user agents with Web, GUI, TUI and command line interfaces. -- I can filter and sort message in whatever order I prefer -- by discussion, by subtopic, by date, by author. -- I can download the entire mail archive or its part to process it offline -- read it, search through it, write messages while offline to send them later. The disadvantages of web chat/forum/trackers: -- It forces me to always be online. -- Very limited support for themes in the interface -- I can only read messages in whatever web interface the f..ing servers and the freaking browsers give me. -- Very limited functionality for message filtering, sorting and searching. Oleg. -- Oleg Broytman http://phdru.name/ phd@phdru.name Programmers don't die, they just GOSUB without RETURN.
On Sat, Aug 13, 2016 at 06:36:06PM +0200, Oleg Broytman <phd@phdru.name> wrote:
-- I can edit messages in my preferred editor (browsers with extensions also allow that though I consider that less convenient). -- I can pipe messages through different programs -- pagers, decoders, decryptors, antispam filters.
Oleg. -- Oleg Broytman http://phdru.name/ phd@phdru.name Programmers don't die, they just GOSUB without RETURN.
On Aug 13, 2016, at 12:36 PM, Oleg Broytman <phd@phdru.name> wrote:
The advantages of email:
I think one of the big trade offs here, is that the traditional mailing list can work very well if everyone involved takes the time to develop a custom tool chain that fits their own workflow perfectly and if they spend the time learning the deficiency of the systems to ensure they correctly work around them. The web forum thing can theoretically achieve much less of a theoretical “maximum” for productivity, but it typically means that you can bring productivity gains to those who can’t or won’t spend time maintaining a custom mailing stack. Essentially it becomes a trade off between losing some of the flexibility/productivity for a handful of people in exchange for boosting productivity for most other folks. One of the big problems with mailing lists is that you have no control over the clients, so you can’t really achieve anything more robust than whatever the lowest common denominator is for all mail clients that are participating in the discussion. An examples: A thread is going off the rails and we wish to redirect them to a new topic or list while either closing the old topic or allowing discussion to continue in the original topic. With the traditional mailing list, your only real options are to tell people to stop and… hope they do that? Except that becomes a problem because people’s email can be severely delayed, people miss messages, etc. I have yet to see a mailing list where someone didn’t accidentally post something to the wrong place, and then you end up having 10+ people all scolding them for posting in the wrong place, meanwhile you have some people answering the question anyways, and it becomes a huge mess. Compare this to the experience with a web forum where you can just move the existing thread immediately, and/or redirect people to a new location and optionally close the old thread to no longer allow posting. I can go on and on, but by having some control over the client, these systems are able to add additional features that make the baseline UX of discussion much better, though perhaps worse for individual users who are willing to spend time carefully crafting their own experience. Consider that almost every advantage you listed for email, could also be considered a disadvantage in that because each of those things are _possible_, that the tooling has to attempt to handle all of those things sanely. — Donald Stufft
Good addition, makes me think. Thank you! On Sat, Aug 13, 2016 at 01:16:01PM -0400, Donald Stufft <donald@stufft.io> wrote:
From the recent and not so recent discussions of Moxi Marlinspike about centralized vs decentralized solutions (unfederated messaging vs email/jabber): "Indeed, cannibalizing a federated application-layer protocol into a centralized service is almost a sure recipe for a successful consumer product today. It's what Slack did with IRC, what Facebook did with email, and what WhatsApp has done with XMPP. In each case, the federated service is stuck in time, while the centralized service is able to iterate into the modern world and beyond.". https://whispersystems.org/blog/the-ecosystem-is-moving/ The problem for me is that it's about consumers while I prefer to deal with powerful users.
Oleg. -- Oleg Broytman http://phdru.name/ phd@phdru.name Programmers don't die, they just GOSUB without RETURN.
On Sun, Aug 14, 2016 at 11:59:56AM +1200, Greg Ewing <greg.ewing@canterbury.ac.nz> wrote:
I disagree with him on many grounds, but many people agree. Email, as we constantly hear, stuck in XIX century. Centralized proprietary messaging deliver people from the necessity to learn email tools and from necessity to use those horrible tools (the fact that they need to learn their shiny new web tools and that those proprietary apps are also quite horrible is usually disregarded).
-- Greg
Oleg. -- Oleg Broytman http://phdru.name/ phd@phdru.name Programmers don't die, they just GOSUB without RETURN.
On Sat, Aug 13, 2016 at 1:16 PM Donald Stufft donald@stufft.io <http://mailto:donald@stufft.io> wrote: I think one of the big trade offs here, is that the traditional mailing
This is an excellent point, and is similar to one that was made on a similar discussion at the start of the year <https://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-ideas/2016-January/038210.html>. That thread focused more on Discourse <https://www.discourse.org/> as a potential alternative to the mailing list for python-ideas, but a lot of the arguments being made here on both sides are a repetition of what was discussed there (and probably of what has been discussed several times over the course of many years). Nick
Please move this discussion to Overload-SIG. It's off-topic on -ideas now that the SIG exists. @overload-sig members: et tu? :-( I do greatly appreciate the restraint shown by those who forwarded to the SIG in lieu of reply here. :-D The SIG has several experimental channels using different discussion modes, and is prepared to instantiate more. That has the advantage of allowing "head to head" comparison of modes in one (but only one) realistic setting. It also encourages thinking about things like "Mailman with Feature X that Discourse has" (nb, preferring Mailman is my bias, YMMV). It is becoming clear from discussion in that SIG that the responsiveness of the projects providing various communiation platforms to our needs, or our willingness (and ability) to develop an appropriate fork, is likely to be important. https://discuss.python.org/c/overload-sig This is a Discourse forum, hosted by python.org. Register as usual for Discourse. Currently inactive, mostly we've moved to Mailman 3 *for now*. https://mail.python.org/pipermail/overload-sig/ This is a Mailman 2 list, obsoleted by the Mailman 3 list below. Archives only are available at that URL (they haven't yet been ported to the Mailman 3 list). Subscriptions have been moved to Mailman 3 permanently, and I think there's a consensus that Mailman 3 is a big win over Mailman 2 (though there is no consensus on comparison with other modes yet). https://mail.python.org/mm3/mailman3/lists/overload-sig@python.org/ This is a Mailman 3 list. Most likely you're not registered with Mailman 3 yet. Just click the Login button anyway, that will provide a registration link. We currently use Mozilla Persona for registration and authentication. You can use a couple of social auth systems for authentication, or register your email with Persona in the usual "get a token URI in the mail" fashion. GitHub We probably *soon* will create a github project for overload-sig. @Guido: It's *not* a good idea to try this out on -ideas yet (unless we don't care if the experimental animal dies).
„I think that just making it easier for new contributors will not help with getting good and dedicated contributors.” This is exactly what Donald was talking about. You are creating an obstacle course for people to go through before they can contribute anything. I totally agree that we need *good contributions* but making it harder does not help. Remember why what made python the best lang in the first place, ease of use…
On Sat, Aug 13, 2016 at 4:30 PM, Arkadiusz Bulski <arek.bulski@gmail.com> wrote:
+ 1 on all the reasons so far why GitHub isn't the only place. In fact, I'd say issue tracker in general is not necessarily a place for discussion except for very development-purpose. Whether it's Mozilla, Python or Cloud Foundry, Apache Cassandra, what not, from my experience, the most meaningful discussion always happens over email and over some kind of personal messaging platform, e.g. IRC or Slack. It's very hard to quantify which platform is best or *better*. Where I work, my development team is 98% exclusive remote and in a different timezone. So to get my message across, I have to either rely on email (and sometimes we don't answer each other's email), or set up a proper meeting, especially we tend to glass over important details or the email is overwhelmingly complex to digest (I have a tendency to write very long very thorough emails and some of my co-workers don't seem to able to get it, perhaps because of language barrier). Since CPython development itself still use its own tracker, discussing within GitHub is not ideal. There is an alternative, and that's using a forum. Rust ditched mailing list and went straight to Discourse [1]. Elasticsearch also ditched email list and went Discourse (although the quality there is quite bad, from my own experience). It's could be an alternative. But before we choose an alternative, let's think for use case. What is it that I can't do easily with mailing list? Does tagging help you organize your discussions? I haven't contributed anything code-wise to CPython development, I am more of a spectator, hoping to learn new things about Python and CPython from reading emails, so I am not in the best position to give you my opinion of defining a dev-release-production workflow. But as a reader, yeah, some kind of filtering, built into my reader client, would be really helpful. Having syntax highlight is also useful. Also, I agree with Guido: a lot of discussions here end up tangent to the original discussion. Off topic discussion is welcome, but I recommend folks to stay away from off topic too often and folks forget to branch off so off topic discussion end up polluting the thread. As a reader, I am tired of that. Thanks. John [1]: https://www.reddit.com/r/rust/comments/2tdqgc/rustdev_say_goodbye_to_the_mai...
On Sat, Aug 13, 2016 at 3:33 PM, John Wong <gokoproject@gmail.com> wrote:
That's an odd juxtaposition, and not true in my experience. I've always hated IRC's culture (too much sniping and too much noise, and an intentional lack of records). While many operational decisions in the Python world are indeed taken on IRC (if that's where the few folks who need to take action on some issue get together), anything that requires some kind of long-lasting record does not belong there. At work I use Slack extensively but again it only works for things that people who aren't online at that very moment can safely skip; for everything else we either create documents that are cooperatively edited, or use trackers or mailing lists (and often all three :-). In the mypy world we simply don't have mailing lists; instead we use three GitHub trackers for everything (one for mypy, one for typeshed, and one for PEP-484 and the typing module). We have many excellent discussions there (in addition to bug reports and triage). In the Python world many meaningful discussions happen in bugs.python.org, as python-ideas is often too polarized to be of much use (the current thread being no exception), while python-dev more and more becomes an "official" channel to be avoided until a decision has already been negotiated elsewhere (stuff I post there runs a serious risk of being quoted out of context in media channels I've never heard of). In terms of putting barriers in place of newbie contributions, mailing lists appear more problematic than GitHub trackers, given how often we get a reply to a digest or an indecipherable jumble of quoting. Trackers also effectively avoid top-posting issues (which no amount of referring to mailing list etiquette can prevent). Note that all these alternatives still send email notifications (to those who want them), and trackers (including GitHub) also allow replies by email. -- --Guido van Rossum (python.org/~guido)
On Sun, Aug 14, 2016 at 12:32 PM, Guido van Rossum <guido@python.org> wrote:
The biggest problem I'm seeing is with digests. Can that feature be flagged off as "DO NOT USE THIS UNLESS YOU KNOW WHAT YOU ARE ASKING FOR"? So many people seem to select digest mode, then get extremely confused by it. ChrisA
On Aug 14, 2016, at 02:01 PM, Chris Angelico wrote:
Yes, we can turn off digests for python-ideas, or any Mailman mailing list. I was tempted to JFDI, but it would mean that ~25% of list members would no longer get messages. That's because 254 out of 979 members are currently receiving digests. Let's give people a grace period, say of one week. You have until Monday 22-Aug-2016 to switch to non-digest delivery or read the mailing list through some other outlet (e.g. Gmane's NNTP interface) if you still want to get messages for python-ideas. Cheers, -Barry P.S. I am refraining from responding to other topics in this thread, since I think the proper place to do that is overload-sig.
Barry Warsaw writes:
"So many"? Of the 5018 posts on this list I've received since Sept 24, 2015 (some were private replies etc, but only a handful), exactly three were inappropriate replies to digests. In the first, on May 2, 2016, the poster very carefully changed the subject, provided a well-organized summary of the posts he had received, and then didn't trim. Failure to trim is a practice that has been common ever since Guido started top-posting from his phone a couple years back. I don't think this is a symptom of "confusion." In the second, on July 8, the poster top-posted on a quoted digest without any way to determine what content he was replying to. However, this person is a reasonably frequent poster since, and has not done it again. Initial confusion, yes, but no real harm done. In the third, on August 2, we have the same as the second. Again, it hasn't happened again although this person has posted a few times since. (That may be due to you advice to turn off digests.) I don't think this is anywhere near as damaging to the list as the practice of top-posting (let alone the bottom-posts, which are more frequent than reply-to-digest).
Is this really sufficient reason for eliminating a feature that more than 1 in 4 subscribers has explicitly chosen? Most of whom never post? How about instead adding "^Subject:.*Python-Ideas Digest, Vol \d+, Issue \d" to the spam filter, and so imposing moderation delay (or even rejection) on the poster? Steve
On Wed, Aug 17, 2016 at 12:11 AM, Stephen J. Turnbull <turnbull.stephen.fw@u.tsukuba.ac.jp> wrote:
It's not just this list, though. I've seen the same phenomenon on other Mailman lists too. I think you're right that top-posting is more of an issue (certainly it's far more prevalent), but it's also a lot harder to solve.
That would be a decent idea. I was thinking more of the sign-up screen, though. How many of those 25% of subscribers really want digests, and how many of them completely misunderstood this: """Would you like to receive list mail batched in a daily digest?""" and picked "Yes" because they want to receive mail every day, rather than having to go to some web page to read it? My counter-suggestion is to simply remove that option from the front page. Anyone who genuinely wants a digest can go into their settings and request it; Mailman's settings pages are a lot more verbose than a sign-up page can be. The obvious default would then be the sane one. ChrisA
On 17Aug2016 02:44, Chris Angelico <rosuav@gmail.com> wrote:
Yes, digests cause a lot of trouble when digest users switch from lurking to posting. (I also think they're a usability fail versus threaded messages). But Stephen's numbers seem plausible. There are other lists where things are worse, I think. Here the noise lvel is low. [...]
Is this really sufficient reason for eliminating a feature that more than 1 in 4 subscribers has explicitly chosen? Most of whom never post?
Personally I think digests are bad enough to actively discourage.
This I support. I think the other driver for digests is people who don't filter their email. They think digests keep their inbox low volume, and have never really looked at the benefits of filtering lists into topic folders. Cheers, Cameron Simpson <cs@zip.com.au>
Just pointing out that there is an official organisation account on github already. All we need is someone to create a repo and people will immediately start posting there. After a week you will see for yourself that it simply works. https://github.com/python For me personally, mailing lists are as ephemeral as chats. I would be more than happy to talk to you folks over WhatsApp. ~~Arkadiusz Bulski~~ Od: Arkadiusz Bulski
On Sun, Aug 14, 2016 at 10:47:36AM +0200, Arkadiusz Bulski <arek.bulski@gmail.com> wrote:
Just pointing out that there is an official organisation account on github already. All we need is someone to create a repo and people will immediately start posting there. After a week you will see for yourself that it simply works. https://github.com/python
I have been being the lead developer and release manager for https://github.com/sqlobject for about 10 years. I have never seen long fruitful communications in web issue tracker. The best discussions happen in our mailing list. So I doubt I can see anything in a week.
For me personally, mailing lists are as ephemeral as chats. I would be more than happy to talk to you folks over WhatsApp.
Are you going to run Python tests on your smartphone? If not, wouldn't it be a little problematic to work on a real computer but to communicate on a phone?
~~Arkadiusz Bulski~~
Od: Arkadiusz Bulski
Oleg. -- Oleg Broytman http://phdru.name/ phd@phdru.name Programmers don't die, they just GOSUB without RETURN.
I throw a proposal on the table: lets create a "python-ideas" repo under "python" account on GitHub and move this and only this thread onto it. If it fails, nothing but this thread is lost (not persisted in the mailing list) which would make no difference anyway. People made many points that are purely abstract. We need some hands on experience to see if it works for us or doesnt. Guido, could you create a repo for us?
On Sun, Aug 14, 2016 at 01:57:03PM +0200, Arek Bulski wrote:
What is your definition of "fails"? If three people follow you onto Github, and say "Well, isn't this nice!", is that a success? Its all well and good to say "let's try it and see", but unless you have concrete, object criteria for success or failure, all that will happen is that some person or group of people will decide on subjective grounds that they like the new way of doing things, or don't, and we all should, or shouldn't, change. -- Steve
On Sun, 14 Aug 2016 at 05:16 Steven D'Aprano <steve@pearwood.info> wrote:
Yep, and in the case of python-ideas that subjective decision falls on my shoulders because you can't measure happiness objectively very well. :( And as for creating a test GH repo for this, I'm thinking about it. But I should mention the only reason I'm thinking about it is because some of us have been discussing the cognitive overload of mailing lists as they currently stand behind the scenes and GH was potentially the next experiment. It has nothing to do with the OP as I believe it would have been a bit more appropriate/nicer to ask for suggestions on how to manage the email volume rather than coming in and say, "I don't like this, so it should change" (a similar issue also came up on the peps repo w/ the OP trying to use that issue tracker for this same proposed purpose, so I'm trying to stay impartial in spite of how this idea has been presented). IOW I'm personally muting this thread as I am not hearing any new information on this topic and it's on me to make a decision as to whether a GitHub repo will be set up as an experiment.
As i think Donald pointed it out, it doesnt take a laptop to contribute. Did you all notice that Guido replied from a phone? Currently half of the mailing list mail is large auto quotes or subject date info. Lines are never broken the way they should be. Who wants to keep their mail toolchains, keep it. Dont make the rest of us put up with this shit. There is no definition of fails just As i dont have a definition of consensus. People will stick to it or not. No voting, just participation. 14 sie 2016 1:57 PM "Arek Bulski" <arek.bulski@gmail.com> napisał(a): I throw a proposal on the table: lets create a "python-ideas" repo under "python" account on GitHub and move this and only this thread onto it. If it fails, nothing but this thread is lost (not persisted in the mailing list) which would make no difference anyway. People made many points that are purely abstract. We need some hands on experience to see if it works for us or doesnt. Guido, could you create a repo for us?
But we do not care if the experimental animal dies, that is the point of doing the experiment. I registered at Discuss and kina like it. Then tried to create a new thread and my Android keyboard shows over the fields. Discuss As it is now doesnt work for mobile. 14 sie 2016 9:35 PM "Arek Bulski" <arek.bulski@gmail.com> napisał(a):
For those talking abstract points, here is a screenshot of GitHub. Works like a charm on mobile. https://s3.postimg.org/e30lc3tk3/Screenshot_2016_08_15_13_00_59_com_browser_... 15 sie 2016 10:34 AM "Arek Bulski" <arek.bulski@gmail.com> napisał(a):
To ease the struggle of pressing "Mark as read" every time an uninteresting email arrives, look for "Mute" button. In Gmail it's under "More" drop-down. Apart from that, I completely agree. Maybe not necessarily GitHub, but something similar that's not email lists. On Sat, Aug 13, 2016 at 9:31 PM, Arek Bulski <arek.bulski@gmail.com> wrote:
On Sun, Aug 14, 2016 at 12:31 AM, Arek Bulski <arek.bulski@gmail.com> wrote:
Strongly disagree. Yes, you have to cope with the topics you're not interested in, but a good email client will help you with that anyway. (In Gmail, for instance, "Mute this thread" does that for you.) You'd have to deal with that on *any* forum, so email is no different. GitHub Issues is *only* good for one purpose, and that is the management of one repository. You tried to start a general Python question on the PEPs repository, which isn't right. It emphasizes the PEP process as if it were the one and only way to discuss Python ideas, which it most certainly isn't - the vast majority of python-ideas threads don't result in PEPs. There are other places where discussion can happen, too. "BPO" (http://bugs.python.org/) is where changes to Python's core code end up - it might be moving to GitHub Issues, but if it does, it wouldn't be part of the PEPs repo, but part of the CPython repo. There's the python-dev mailing list, where a lot of traffic isn't specifically about changes to anything at all, but is about general policies and such. And python-list (aka comp.lang.python) also gets a lot of discussion, although you'd start a thread on python-list if you expect the answer to be more of "Here's how you can do that" than "Yes/no, we will/won't add that to the language". They're unlikely to shift to GitHub Issues. Ultimately, email is the best way that I've *ever* seen for discussing important matters like this. All the others (BPO, GH Issues, etc), and even social media (eg when Christine sends me a Twitter message), channel through to email - GitHub sends me an email any time an issue is created or commented on, etc. Every important discussion I've ever been involved with has been in one of my email inboxes, with the possible exception of real-time conversations - which then end up being ephemeral. The ONLY benefit you're stating for GH Issues is that it has per-topic notifications. Those would be broken the instant a discussion begins to wander, as you get the age-old problem of "is this a reply to that, or is it a new topic?" (answer: it's both), so I think you'd find the advantage over email isn't all that great anyway. Get Mozilla Thunderbird or Squirrel Mail or some other at least half-way decent mail client, and you should be able to cope with python-ideas. ChrisA
I don't have time to respond at length, but I would just like to mention that I'm actually pretty tired of email threads getting off the rails and wouldn't mind looking at other approaches, including possibly a dedicated GitHub tracker (*not* the cpython or peps repo's tracker). There are other possible solutions too, e.g. discourse or MailMan3 + HyperKitty. Like Chris, I live in my inbox and everything of importance must come through there or I won't know about it, but that doesn't imply to me that it's the best way to manage discussions. I frequently go to the website (e.g. GitHub, bugs.python.org, discourse) for a better UI to peruse and manage a discussion. A few projects I'm on have no mailing list, only GitHub trackers, and they seem to work well for a variety of purposes, including newbie help, bugs, philosophical discussions, and debates on the future shape of specific features. It takes away the whole "is this a bug or is it a feature" insecurity that many people have before posting to a tracker (often out of fear of annoying the developers) -- you just post to the tracker and someone will triage it, and your head won't be bitten off. That's all I have time for. On Sat, Aug 13, 2016 at 8:41 AM, Chris Angelico <rosuav@gmail.com> wrote:
-- --Guido van Rossum (python.org/~guido)
Hi! Let me completely disagree. On Sat, Aug 13, 2016 at 04:31:06PM +0200, Arek Bulski <arek.bulski@gmail.com> wrote:
The advantages of email: -- Push technology: it's delivered to my mailbox and I don't need to visit the discussion site. -- I can filter incoming messages and deliver them to whatever mailboxes I prefer. -- I can read it in any interface I prefer -- there are mail user agents with Web, GUI, TUI and command line interfaces. -- I can filter and sort message in whatever order I prefer -- by discussion, by subtopic, by date, by author. -- I can download the entire mail archive or its part to process it offline -- read it, search through it, write messages while offline to send them later. The disadvantages of web chat/forum/trackers: -- It forces me to always be online. -- Very limited support for themes in the interface -- I can only read messages in whatever web interface the f..ing servers and the freaking browsers give me. -- Very limited functionality for message filtering, sorting and searching. Oleg. -- Oleg Broytman http://phdru.name/ phd@phdru.name Programmers don't die, they just GOSUB without RETURN.
On Sat, Aug 13, 2016 at 06:36:06PM +0200, Oleg Broytman <phd@phdru.name> wrote:
-- I can edit messages in my preferred editor (browsers with extensions also allow that though I consider that less convenient). -- I can pipe messages through different programs -- pagers, decoders, decryptors, antispam filters.
Oleg. -- Oleg Broytman http://phdru.name/ phd@phdru.name Programmers don't die, they just GOSUB without RETURN.
On Aug 13, 2016, at 12:36 PM, Oleg Broytman <phd@phdru.name> wrote:
The advantages of email:
I think one of the big trade offs here, is that the traditional mailing list can work very well if everyone involved takes the time to develop a custom tool chain that fits their own workflow perfectly and if they spend the time learning the deficiency of the systems to ensure they correctly work around them. The web forum thing can theoretically achieve much less of a theoretical “maximum” for productivity, but it typically means that you can bring productivity gains to those who can’t or won’t spend time maintaining a custom mailing stack. Essentially it becomes a trade off between losing some of the flexibility/productivity for a handful of people in exchange for boosting productivity for most other folks. One of the big problems with mailing lists is that you have no control over the clients, so you can’t really achieve anything more robust than whatever the lowest common denominator is for all mail clients that are participating in the discussion. An examples: A thread is going off the rails and we wish to redirect them to a new topic or list while either closing the old topic or allowing discussion to continue in the original topic. With the traditional mailing list, your only real options are to tell people to stop and… hope they do that? Except that becomes a problem because people’s email can be severely delayed, people miss messages, etc. I have yet to see a mailing list where someone didn’t accidentally post something to the wrong place, and then you end up having 10+ people all scolding them for posting in the wrong place, meanwhile you have some people answering the question anyways, and it becomes a huge mess. Compare this to the experience with a web forum where you can just move the existing thread immediately, and/or redirect people to a new location and optionally close the old thread to no longer allow posting. I can go on and on, but by having some control over the client, these systems are able to add additional features that make the baseline UX of discussion much better, though perhaps worse for individual users who are willing to spend time carefully crafting their own experience. Consider that almost every advantage you listed for email, could also be considered a disadvantage in that because each of those things are _possible_, that the tooling has to attempt to handle all of those things sanely. — Donald Stufft
Good addition, makes me think. Thank you! On Sat, Aug 13, 2016 at 01:16:01PM -0400, Donald Stufft <donald@stufft.io> wrote:
From the recent and not so recent discussions of Moxi Marlinspike about centralized vs decentralized solutions (unfederated messaging vs email/jabber): "Indeed, cannibalizing a federated application-layer protocol into a centralized service is almost a sure recipe for a successful consumer product today. It's what Slack did with IRC, what Facebook did with email, and what WhatsApp has done with XMPP. In each case, the federated service is stuck in time, while the centralized service is able to iterate into the modern world and beyond.". https://whispersystems.org/blog/the-ecosystem-is-moving/ The problem for me is that it's about consumers while I prefer to deal with powerful users.
Oleg. -- Oleg Broytman http://phdru.name/ phd@phdru.name Programmers don't die, they just GOSUB without RETURN.
On Sun, Aug 14, 2016 at 11:59:56AM +1200, Greg Ewing <greg.ewing@canterbury.ac.nz> wrote:
I disagree with him on many grounds, but many people agree. Email, as we constantly hear, stuck in XIX century. Centralized proprietary messaging deliver people from the necessity to learn email tools and from necessity to use those horrible tools (the fact that they need to learn their shiny new web tools and that those proprietary apps are also quite horrible is usually disregarded).
-- Greg
Oleg. -- Oleg Broytman http://phdru.name/ phd@phdru.name Programmers don't die, they just GOSUB without RETURN.
On Sat, Aug 13, 2016 at 1:16 PM Donald Stufft donald@stufft.io <http://mailto:donald@stufft.io> wrote: I think one of the big trade offs here, is that the traditional mailing
This is an excellent point, and is similar to one that was made on a similar discussion at the start of the year <https://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-ideas/2016-January/038210.html>. That thread focused more on Discourse <https://www.discourse.org/> as a potential alternative to the mailing list for python-ideas, but a lot of the arguments being made here on both sides are a repetition of what was discussed there (and probably of what has been discussed several times over the course of many years). Nick
Please move this discussion to Overload-SIG. It's off-topic on -ideas now that the SIG exists. @overload-sig members: et tu? :-( I do greatly appreciate the restraint shown by those who forwarded to the SIG in lieu of reply here. :-D The SIG has several experimental channels using different discussion modes, and is prepared to instantiate more. That has the advantage of allowing "head to head" comparison of modes in one (but only one) realistic setting. It also encourages thinking about things like "Mailman with Feature X that Discourse has" (nb, preferring Mailman is my bias, YMMV). It is becoming clear from discussion in that SIG that the responsiveness of the projects providing various communiation platforms to our needs, or our willingness (and ability) to develop an appropriate fork, is likely to be important. https://discuss.python.org/c/overload-sig This is a Discourse forum, hosted by python.org. Register as usual for Discourse. Currently inactive, mostly we've moved to Mailman 3 *for now*. https://mail.python.org/pipermail/overload-sig/ This is a Mailman 2 list, obsoleted by the Mailman 3 list below. Archives only are available at that URL (they haven't yet been ported to the Mailman 3 list). Subscriptions have been moved to Mailman 3 permanently, and I think there's a consensus that Mailman 3 is a big win over Mailman 2 (though there is no consensus on comparison with other modes yet). https://mail.python.org/mm3/mailman3/lists/overload-sig@python.org/ This is a Mailman 3 list. Most likely you're not registered with Mailman 3 yet. Just click the Login button anyway, that will provide a registration link. We currently use Mozilla Persona for registration and authentication. You can use a couple of social auth systems for authentication, or register your email with Persona in the usual "get a token URI in the mail" fashion. GitHub We probably *soon* will create a github project for overload-sig. @Guido: It's *not* a good idea to try this out on -ideas yet (unless we don't care if the experimental animal dies).
„I think that just making it easier for new contributors will not help with getting good and dedicated contributors.” This is exactly what Donald was talking about. You are creating an obstacle course for people to go through before they can contribute anything. I totally agree that we need *good contributions* but making it harder does not help. Remember why what made python the best lang in the first place, ease of use…
On Sat, Aug 13, 2016 at 4:30 PM, Arkadiusz Bulski <arek.bulski@gmail.com> wrote:
+ 1 on all the reasons so far why GitHub isn't the only place. In fact, I'd say issue tracker in general is not necessarily a place for discussion except for very development-purpose. Whether it's Mozilla, Python or Cloud Foundry, Apache Cassandra, what not, from my experience, the most meaningful discussion always happens over email and over some kind of personal messaging platform, e.g. IRC or Slack. It's very hard to quantify which platform is best or *better*. Where I work, my development team is 98% exclusive remote and in a different timezone. So to get my message across, I have to either rely on email (and sometimes we don't answer each other's email), or set up a proper meeting, especially we tend to glass over important details or the email is overwhelmingly complex to digest (I have a tendency to write very long very thorough emails and some of my co-workers don't seem to able to get it, perhaps because of language barrier). Since CPython development itself still use its own tracker, discussing within GitHub is not ideal. There is an alternative, and that's using a forum. Rust ditched mailing list and went straight to Discourse [1]. Elasticsearch also ditched email list and went Discourse (although the quality there is quite bad, from my own experience). It's could be an alternative. But before we choose an alternative, let's think for use case. What is it that I can't do easily with mailing list? Does tagging help you organize your discussions? I haven't contributed anything code-wise to CPython development, I am more of a spectator, hoping to learn new things about Python and CPython from reading emails, so I am not in the best position to give you my opinion of defining a dev-release-production workflow. But as a reader, yeah, some kind of filtering, built into my reader client, would be really helpful. Having syntax highlight is also useful. Also, I agree with Guido: a lot of discussions here end up tangent to the original discussion. Off topic discussion is welcome, but I recommend folks to stay away from off topic too often and folks forget to branch off so off topic discussion end up polluting the thread. As a reader, I am tired of that. Thanks. John [1]: https://www.reddit.com/r/rust/comments/2tdqgc/rustdev_say_goodbye_to_the_mai...
On Sat, Aug 13, 2016 at 3:33 PM, John Wong <gokoproject@gmail.com> wrote:
That's an odd juxtaposition, and not true in my experience. I've always hated IRC's culture (too much sniping and too much noise, and an intentional lack of records). While many operational decisions in the Python world are indeed taken on IRC (if that's where the few folks who need to take action on some issue get together), anything that requires some kind of long-lasting record does not belong there. At work I use Slack extensively but again it only works for things that people who aren't online at that very moment can safely skip; for everything else we either create documents that are cooperatively edited, or use trackers or mailing lists (and often all three :-). In the mypy world we simply don't have mailing lists; instead we use three GitHub trackers for everything (one for mypy, one for typeshed, and one for PEP-484 and the typing module). We have many excellent discussions there (in addition to bug reports and triage). In the Python world many meaningful discussions happen in bugs.python.org, as python-ideas is often too polarized to be of much use (the current thread being no exception), while python-dev more and more becomes an "official" channel to be avoided until a decision has already been negotiated elsewhere (stuff I post there runs a serious risk of being quoted out of context in media channels I've never heard of). In terms of putting barriers in place of newbie contributions, mailing lists appear more problematic than GitHub trackers, given how often we get a reply to a digest or an indecipherable jumble of quoting. Trackers also effectively avoid top-posting issues (which no amount of referring to mailing list etiquette can prevent). Note that all these alternatives still send email notifications (to those who want them), and trackers (including GitHub) also allow replies by email. -- --Guido van Rossum (python.org/~guido)
On Sun, Aug 14, 2016 at 12:32 PM, Guido van Rossum <guido@python.org> wrote:
The biggest problem I'm seeing is with digests. Can that feature be flagged off as "DO NOT USE THIS UNLESS YOU KNOW WHAT YOU ARE ASKING FOR"? So many people seem to select digest mode, then get extremely confused by it. ChrisA
On Aug 14, 2016, at 02:01 PM, Chris Angelico wrote:
Yes, we can turn off digests for python-ideas, or any Mailman mailing list. I was tempted to JFDI, but it would mean that ~25% of list members would no longer get messages. That's because 254 out of 979 members are currently receiving digests. Let's give people a grace period, say of one week. You have until Monday 22-Aug-2016 to switch to non-digest delivery or read the mailing list through some other outlet (e.g. Gmane's NNTP interface) if you still want to get messages for python-ideas. Cheers, -Barry P.S. I am refraining from responding to other topics in this thread, since I think the proper place to do that is overload-sig.
Barry Warsaw writes:
"So many"? Of the 5018 posts on this list I've received since Sept 24, 2015 (some were private replies etc, but only a handful), exactly three were inappropriate replies to digests. In the first, on May 2, 2016, the poster very carefully changed the subject, provided a well-organized summary of the posts he had received, and then didn't trim. Failure to trim is a practice that has been common ever since Guido started top-posting from his phone a couple years back. I don't think this is a symptom of "confusion." In the second, on July 8, the poster top-posted on a quoted digest without any way to determine what content he was replying to. However, this person is a reasonably frequent poster since, and has not done it again. Initial confusion, yes, but no real harm done. In the third, on August 2, we have the same as the second. Again, it hasn't happened again although this person has posted a few times since. (That may be due to you advice to turn off digests.) I don't think this is anywhere near as damaging to the list as the practice of top-posting (let alone the bottom-posts, which are more frequent than reply-to-digest).
Is this really sufficient reason for eliminating a feature that more than 1 in 4 subscribers has explicitly chosen? Most of whom never post? How about instead adding "^Subject:.*Python-Ideas Digest, Vol \d+, Issue \d" to the spam filter, and so imposing moderation delay (or even rejection) on the poster? Steve
On Wed, Aug 17, 2016 at 12:11 AM, Stephen J. Turnbull <turnbull.stephen.fw@u.tsukuba.ac.jp> wrote:
It's not just this list, though. I've seen the same phenomenon on other Mailman lists too. I think you're right that top-posting is more of an issue (certainly it's far more prevalent), but it's also a lot harder to solve.
That would be a decent idea. I was thinking more of the sign-up screen, though. How many of those 25% of subscribers really want digests, and how many of them completely misunderstood this: """Would you like to receive list mail batched in a daily digest?""" and picked "Yes" because they want to receive mail every day, rather than having to go to some web page to read it? My counter-suggestion is to simply remove that option from the front page. Anyone who genuinely wants a digest can go into their settings and request it; Mailman's settings pages are a lot more verbose than a sign-up page can be. The obvious default would then be the sane one. ChrisA
On 17Aug2016 02:44, Chris Angelico <rosuav@gmail.com> wrote:
Yes, digests cause a lot of trouble when digest users switch from lurking to posting. (I also think they're a usability fail versus threaded messages). But Stephen's numbers seem plausible. There are other lists where things are worse, I think. Here the noise lvel is low. [...]
Is this really sufficient reason for eliminating a feature that more than 1 in 4 subscribers has explicitly chosen? Most of whom never post?
Personally I think digests are bad enough to actively discourage.
This I support. I think the other driver for digests is people who don't filter their email. They think digests keep their inbox low volume, and have never really looked at the benefits of filtering lists into topic folders. Cheers, Cameron Simpson <cs@zip.com.au>
Just pointing out that there is an official organisation account on github already. All we need is someone to create a repo and people will immediately start posting there. After a week you will see for yourself that it simply works. https://github.com/python For me personally, mailing lists are as ephemeral as chats. I would be more than happy to talk to you folks over WhatsApp. ~~Arkadiusz Bulski~~ Od: Arkadiusz Bulski
On Sun, Aug 14, 2016 at 10:47:36AM +0200, Arkadiusz Bulski <arek.bulski@gmail.com> wrote:
Just pointing out that there is an official organisation account on github already. All we need is someone to create a repo and people will immediately start posting there. After a week you will see for yourself that it simply works. https://github.com/python
I have been being the lead developer and release manager for https://github.com/sqlobject for about 10 years. I have never seen long fruitful communications in web issue tracker. The best discussions happen in our mailing list. So I doubt I can see anything in a week.
For me personally, mailing lists are as ephemeral as chats. I would be more than happy to talk to you folks over WhatsApp.
Are you going to run Python tests on your smartphone? If not, wouldn't it be a little problematic to work on a real computer but to communicate on a phone?
~~Arkadiusz Bulski~~
Od: Arkadiusz Bulski
Oleg. -- Oleg Broytman http://phdru.name/ phd@phdru.name Programmers don't die, they just GOSUB without RETURN.
I throw a proposal on the table: lets create a "python-ideas" repo under "python" account on GitHub and move this and only this thread onto it. If it fails, nothing but this thread is lost (not persisted in the mailing list) which would make no difference anyway. People made many points that are purely abstract. We need some hands on experience to see if it works for us or doesnt. Guido, could you create a repo for us?
On Sun, Aug 14, 2016 at 01:57:03PM +0200, Arek Bulski wrote:
What is your definition of "fails"? If three people follow you onto Github, and say "Well, isn't this nice!", is that a success? Its all well and good to say "let's try it and see", but unless you have concrete, object criteria for success or failure, all that will happen is that some person or group of people will decide on subjective grounds that they like the new way of doing things, or don't, and we all should, or shouldn't, change. -- Steve
On Sun, 14 Aug 2016 at 05:16 Steven D'Aprano <steve@pearwood.info> wrote:
Yep, and in the case of python-ideas that subjective decision falls on my shoulders because you can't measure happiness objectively very well. :( And as for creating a test GH repo for this, I'm thinking about it. But I should mention the only reason I'm thinking about it is because some of us have been discussing the cognitive overload of mailing lists as they currently stand behind the scenes and GH was potentially the next experiment. It has nothing to do with the OP as I believe it would have been a bit more appropriate/nicer to ask for suggestions on how to manage the email volume rather than coming in and say, "I don't like this, so it should change" (a similar issue also came up on the peps repo w/ the OP trying to use that issue tracker for this same proposed purpose, so I'm trying to stay impartial in spite of how this idea has been presented). IOW I'm personally muting this thread as I am not hearing any new information on this topic and it's on me to make a decision as to whether a GitHub repo will be set up as an experiment.
As i think Donald pointed it out, it doesnt take a laptop to contribute. Did you all notice that Guido replied from a phone? Currently half of the mailing list mail is large auto quotes or subject date info. Lines are never broken the way they should be. Who wants to keep their mail toolchains, keep it. Dont make the rest of us put up with this shit. There is no definition of fails just As i dont have a definition of consensus. People will stick to it or not. No voting, just participation. 14 sie 2016 1:57 PM "Arek Bulski" <arek.bulski@gmail.com> napisał(a): I throw a proposal on the table: lets create a "python-ideas" repo under "python" account on GitHub and move this and only this thread onto it. If it fails, nothing but this thread is lost (not persisted in the mailing list) which would make no difference anyway. People made many points that are purely abstract. We need some hands on experience to see if it works for us or doesnt. Guido, could you create a repo for us?
But we do not care if the experimental animal dies, that is the point of doing the experiment. I registered at Discuss and kina like it. Then tried to create a new thread and my Android keyboard shows over the fields. Discuss As it is now doesnt work for mobile. 14 sie 2016 9:35 PM "Arek Bulski" <arek.bulski@gmail.com> napisał(a):
For those talking abstract points, here is a screenshot of GitHub. Works like a charm on mobile. https://s3.postimg.org/e30lc3tk3/Screenshot_2016_08_15_13_00_59_com_browser_... 15 sie 2016 10:34 AM "Arek Bulski" <arek.bulski@gmail.com> napisał(a):
participants (15)
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Arek Bulski -
Arkadiusz Bulski
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Barry Warsaw -
Brett Cannon -
Chris Angelico -
cs＠zip.com.au -
Donald Stufft -
Eugene Pakhomov -
Greg Ewing -
Guido van Rossum -
John Wong -
Nicholas Chammas -
Oleg Broytman -
Stephen J. Turnbull -
Steven D'Aprano