[Catalog-sig] More problems with the comments system...

["Martin v. Löwis"]

>> That's true, and unfortunate. Can you propose an alternative approach
>> (short of removing the comment facility altogether)?
> 
> Perhaps when someone removes their comment it will say "comment removed"
> (and the commenter's name could be eliminated as well). The followups
> would remain in-tact this way. That isn't the complete context of course
> for future readers, but better than nothing.

Ok, will do.

> I wanted to comment on the package itself, because my comment got
> removed in a comment on a comment. I wanted to put this information back
> in.
> 
> Of course often updating the long description is an alternative to doing
> so. But this would have been quite a bit more work than placing a
> comment; the long description of this package is generated by setup.py
> of the package, and it'd meant having to check out the package and doing
> a new description upload. I just wanted to spend a minute to provide
> helpful information.

Assuming your comment wasn't actually removed, this specific need would
go away, right?

Notice that you don't have to run the complete upload process again if
you want to edit the long description - you can easily do that over the
web page as well.

>>> If comment disabling is implemented, I think a nice feature might be to
>>> repeat the author email metadata in its place (or perhaps a special
>>> metadata field for diccussion forums). This way someone who wants to
>>> comment on the package gets a clear indication of where they can to go.
>>
>> This I cannot understand. Can you rephrase?
> 
> If it's possible to disable comments on a per-package basis, it might be
> useful to say in the UI:
> 
> "If you want to comment on this package, please use the following forum:
> <mailing list address or http link>."

Now, *that* is something that I would consider appropriate for
long_description.

Notice that the comment facility in PyPI is quite different from posting
to a mailing list. The audience for the mailing list are
developers/authors of the package, and current users. The (intended) use
of the PyPI commenting facility is to address prospective users of the
package, which want to know whether the package is any good.

> But perhaps there's a better idea than that: it would be useful to
> provide a "feedback" functionality for a package. This is separate from
> comments: comments are meant to be read by others. Feedback is supposed
> to go to the package maintainers but doesn't need to be shown.

Again, that's (yet) another feature - messages that are primarily
addressed at the package authors.

I'm not sure many package authors would like that (and the poll
indicates that the option "mail to package owner only" receives
little interest). They either have bug reporting and support channels
already, or they would prefer to get such messages in direct email;
some may not want to be bothered with package feedback at all.

Regards,
Martin