[python-committers] Timeline to vote for a governance PEP

[Antoine Pitrou]

Le 03/11/2018 à 18:26, Donald Stufft a écrit :
>>>
>>> Indeed.  As soon as a discussion is starting to become branchy,
>>> Discourse just ruins readability compared to a normal threaded
>>> discussion system.  The electoral system discussion is an example of
>>> that:
>>> https://discuss.python.org/t/python-governance-electoral-system/290
>>>
>>
>> Huh, I found the experience exactly the opposite. I was just remarking
>> last night how glad I was that the discussion happened in discourse
>> instead of on the mailing list, because of how poorly I felt the
>> discussion would have gone on a mailing list. The ability to trivially
>> multi quote alone was a drastic improvement, much less the ability to
>> control, on a topic by topic basis, what level of notification I
>> wanted for that topic.

The fact that you were an active participant all along in that
discussion might paint the thing in brighter colours for you.  But I
think anyone *discovering* the discussion in its current state will have
trouble making heads or tails of which subtopics were spawned, and
whether/how they resolved.

> Perhaps the difference is in that every mail client I’ve ever used
> presents mailing list threads (or any thread) as a singular flat stream
> anyways?

Er, really?  Generally they give you an option to turn on or off
threaded display.  And that in itself is a huge advantage: you can
change the setting at will, depending on your preference.  Often you can
even do so on a per-folder or per-account basis (at least with
Thunderbird you do).

Discourse doesn't allow anything of that.  It doesn't even *record*
anything about the topical discussion flow, so it's not like a
third-party tool or plugin could fix the problem, since the information
is lost.  You're basically forced to accept the flat discussion view,
which is completely unworkable to review a long and branchy discussion.

> To be honest, I find the threaded views on like hyper kitty or
> piper mail to be abysmal anyways :|

Hyper kitty doesn't *have* a threaded view AFAICT (or if it does, the
CSS does its best to hide the threading :-)).  And that's why many
people like me largely prefer the pipermail format, even though there
are genuine technical arguments against pipermail.

Regards

Antoine.