[Python-ideas] A bit meta

[Donald Stufft]

> On Feb 1, 2016, at 6:46 AM, Antoine Pitrou <antoine at python.org> wrote:
> 
> Stefan Krah <skrah.temporarily at ...> writes:
>> 
>> It does not sound interesting at all -- Python development is increasingly
>> turning into a circus, with fewer and fewer people actually writing code.
> 
> An interesting metric is to compute how much the set of posters on this
> "meta" thread intersects the set of the most active developers:
> 

Arguably changes like this are not primarily to benefit the people who are
already contributing, those people have already decided that the current
tooling isn't enough of a deterence to not contribute, but either allow new
people to more easily contribute (in this case, via discussion) or people who
are small time contributors to contribute more often.

Of course, you don't want to ignore the people who are already contributing
or make a decision solely focused on trying to attract new contributors (or
increase contributions from small time contributors) since you run the risk of
alienating the folks currently doing most of the work and then not getting any
new contributions anyways.

More to the topic at hand, I think the mailing list interface is kind of crummy
and relies on people hand tailoring a bunch of filters to make it in any way
reasonable. I have no idea if discourse or mailman3 is any better or if they
are just differently bad, though on the packaging side of things I'd love to
at least experiment with discourse since I think the *idea* of it is very
nice, but no idea how it works in practice. There was a post earlier on about
someone's experience with using discourse entirely in the "pretend it's a
mailing list" mode and there were some pretty decent flaws, which is kind of
disheartening.


-----------------
Donald Stufft
PGP: 0x6E3CBCE93372DCFA // 7C6B 7C5D 5E2B 6356 A926 F04F 6E3C BCE9 3372 DCFA

-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: signature.asc
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 842 bytes
Desc: Message signed with OpenPGP using GPGMail
URL: <http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-ideas/attachments/20160201/54df01fb/attachment.sig>