[Overload-sig] Should we import old MM discussions into e.g. Discourse?

Thu Jun 23 14:42:37 EDT 2016

It's too soon to actually do this, but the way I imagine it, it would be
very organic. We announce that there's a new forum (e.g. Discourse) and we
encourage people to try it out. That's all for phase 1. If we end up liking
it we can have a discussion (on Discourse :-) for how to make its use more
mandatory, and for what purposes to keep using the list. And those
rules/conventions can evolve.

PS. Above, 'Discourse' is really just a variable standing in for the actual
system we're going to try. But for overload-sig specifically let's move to
Discourse, if Donald can set it up.

(And yes, I'm intentionally ignoring list etiquette here, to demonstrate
the problems we're trying to solve.)

--Guido

On Thu, Jun 23, 2016 at 10:57 AM, Brett Cannon <brett at python.org> wrote:

> So basically python-dev implicitly becoming python-dev-announce while all
> actual discussion occurring on Discourse? If that's the case I would be
> curious to know how the separation would be as to what should go where. I
> can see things like release details being announced (e.g. "we're cutting
> 3.6.a2 on such-and-such a date"), but otherwise I would think everything
> else would involve some form of discussion. And if that's the case then
> it's more of a python-releases mailing list where anyone can subscribe but
> only RMs can post (and maybe maintainers of other implementations).
>
> And if whatever wins this discussion requires a migration, we can do it in
> phases based on things directly tied to Python's development (e.g.
> python-dev and SIGs), then consider expanding it (e.g. python-list if
> people want to go that far).
>
> On Thu, 23 Jun 2016 at 10:29 Guido van Rossum <guido at python.org> wrote:
>
>> I think a clean break would actually be preferable.
>>
>> I think it would be fine to have the Discourse and MM instance both be
>> active, for slightly different purposes. E.g. python-dev would be more of a
>> news broadcast, with a social convention to discourage responses and have
>> discussions on Discourse instead.
>>
>> On Thu, Jun 23, 2016 at 10:22 AM, Donald Stufft <donald at stufft.io> wrote:
>>
>>>
>>> On Jun 23, 2016, at 1:14 PM, Guido van Rossum <guido at python.org> wrote:
>>>
>>> I'm trying something new here: moving a reply to a different subject.
>>>
>>> On Thu, Jun 23, 2016 at 9:00 AM, Skip Montanaro <
>>> skip.montanaro at gmail.com> wrote:
>>>
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> On Thu, Jun 23, 2016 at 9:27 AM, Donald Stufft <donald at stufft.io>
>>>> wrote:
>>>>
>>>>> For a short time period I think it’s fine to try and test
>>>>> the waters, but long term we should pick one tool, whatever that tool
>>>>> is, for this
>>>>> kind of discussion [1] and bless that and get rid of anything else.
>>>>> Whether that’s
>>>>> mailman or discourse or something else.
>>>>>
>>>>
>>>> If you decided that (for example) python-dev would move to Discourse,
>>>> is there
>>>>
>>>> a) some way to suck the old MM archives into Discourse?
>>>>
>>>> b) allow search engines to index them?
>>>>
>>>> It's not clear that the infinite scroll thing allows for (easy)
>>>> indexing, though I assume Google and Bing have their collective act
>>>> together in this regard.
>>>>
>>>> Would the MM->some-kind-of-forum decision be made on a list-by-list
>>>> basis, or would some lists always remain MM-hosted? I can see where the
>>>> natives might get very restless if you migrated comp.lang.python/
>>>> python-list at python.org to some sort of forum tool. Python-dev or
>>>> python-ideas would be bad enough, but for c.l.p it would probably be
>>>> torches and pitchforks time.
>>>>
>>>
>>> I personally think that in this case (unlike hg->git) there is little
>>> benefit to importing old discussions. The old discussions *do* have
>>> permalinks, in pipermail and various other archives (e.g. activestate).
>>> Those links are already being used and we should try very hard not to break
>>> such links. That probably means keeping pipermail running forever, in
>>> read-only mode.
>>>
>>>
>>> This is two things I think, I totally agree we should not break those
>>> existing links and we should keep piper mail running forever in read-only
>>> mode. When it comes to importing the old discussions, I think there is
>>> benefit to them:
>>>
>>> * It would provide a seeding of “We noticed you were posting a topic
>>> that looks similar to an older one?”
>>> * It’d enable interlinking using the discourse mechanisms for those
>>> older posts instead of having to find the piper mail url and linking to
>>> that.
>>>
>>> I don’t think these are super huge benefits though, so I’m also
>>> perfectly happy to start fresh (particularly if we try and import and it
>>> ends up munging up the formatting to the degree the old messages aren’t
>>> very useful).
>>>
>>>
>>> FWIW I also don't think we need to shut down the existing mailing lists.
>>> They serve a purpose. But they should not be the only place where we
>>> discuss things (that's my definition of "forum" BTW) and probably not the
>>> busiest place. I hope we can move all lists on mail.python.org to
>>> MM3/HyperKitty with minimal disruption -- again I think it would be fine if
>>> the archives weren't imported, even if that means some threads will be
>>> split across two archival systems. That's not the end of the world.
>>>
>>>
>>> Does this mean that you you’d want to say (pretending we decide to move
>>> python-dev to discourse) keep a python-dev MM list and have them run
>>> parallel, disparate discussions?
>>>
>>>
>>> --
>>> --Guido van Rossum (python.org/~guido)
>>> _______________________________________________
>>> Overload-sig mailing list
>>> Overload-sig at python.org
>>> https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/overload-sig
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> —
>>> Donald Stufft
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>
>>
>> --
>> --Guido van Rossum (python.org/~guido)
>> _______________________________________________
>> Overload-sig mailing list
>> Overload-sig at python.org
>> https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/overload-sig
>>
>

-- 
--Guido van Rossum (python.org/~guido)
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