[Python-ideas] From mailing list to GitHub issues

[John Wong]

On Sat, Aug 13, 2016 at 4:30 PM, Arkadiusz Bulski <arek.bulski at gmail.com>
wrote:

> „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…
>
>
+ 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_mailing_list/
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