[Python-ideas] From mailing list to GitHub issues

[Brett Cannon]

On Sat, 13 Aug 2016 at 11:39 Donald Stufft <donald at stufft.io> wrote:

>
> > On Aug 13, 2016, at 2:21 PM, Oleg Broytman <phd at phdru.name> wrote:
> >
> >>
> >> As Donald pointed out, there are people who are not going to create
> >> custom email processing toolchains.
> >
> >   In what way they will be helpful to the development of Python?
> > Contributors have to install, learn, configure and use a lot of
> > development tools, comparing to which email tools are just toys.
>
>
> Well, I personally generally do not have the time to sit there and craft
> some sort of complex email toolchain to deal with it. I just leave lists
> if their volume are too high for me to deal with or they don’t provide me
> the tools to interact with them in a non frustrating way. For example, I’m
> no longer subscribed to python-dev because of these reasons. I *think* I’ve
> positively impacted the development of Python, but maybe not! In any case
> I think that falling down the trap of thinking that anyone who is willing
> to contribute to Python is also willing to maintain a personal toolchain
> for dealing with the deficiencies in mailing lists is not a place we should
> be in.
>
> That’s not to say that a traditional mailing list may not represent the
> best
> trade off— I have my opinion, you have yours, but we should not start
> thinking
> that adding an obstacle course that a user must complete before they can
> meaningfully contribute is doing anything but self selecting for people
> willing
> to run that particular obstacle course, not selecting for skill or likely
> impact.
>

To give another example of how mailing lists put people at the mercy of how
much time and expertise they have with their MUA, python-dev received
https://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2016-August/145815.html today.
Now in the archives that email looks fine, but the two opening paragraphs
of that email came formatted a bit differently into my inbox (which is
Google Inbox):
```
Hello,

We are experimenting with a tool for inspecting how well languages and
libraries support server certificate verification when establishing TLS
connections.

We are getting rather confusing results in our first major shootout of
bundled CPython 2 and 3 versions in major, still supported OS
distributions. We would love to get any insight into the test stubs and
results. Maybe we are doing something horribly wrong?
```

That's a mess and the whole email is formatted like that. I actually have
not read the email because of the formatting issue. As Oleg pointed out,
when you go with a federated solution like mail, you are the mercy of
whatever tools people choose to use with the service. But when you use a
centralized approach you know the experience is consistent for everyone and
thus there's a certain level of quality control.

Now some say we don't need to include more people in discussions and we
should let the power users continue to use their powerful workflows, while
others say we should make it easier for all to participate. For me this
community is known for being welcoming and I want to foster that, and if
that means some of us have to use slightly less powerful tools to manage
conversations so that everyone gets a better experience overall then I say
that's worthy tradeoff.
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