On 7/29/20 10:14 PM, Jeremy Stanley wrote:
On 2020-07-30 07:17:03 +0530 (+0530), Pradyun Gedam wrote:
TL;DR: OK to archive this mailing list? Reply by Aug 30th.
[...]
I find it disappointing that there will no longer be a mailing list
for discussions of Python packaging. Web forums with some E-mail
integration are hardly the same. But those of us who still use
E-mail (and worse, Usenet) eventually need to get out of the way of
the wheels of progress lest they run us over.
Many thanks to those who have maintained, moderated, and
collaborated through this list over the years. It has been much
appreciated.
Jeremy, I'm not sure whether you were serious? If your disappointment is
only out of nostalgia, then yeah, accepting change makes sense. But if
your disappointment is because the Discourse experience is/will be worse
for your participation, then it's totally fine to speak up and tell us how.
Pradyun, thanks for starting this conversation.
I am definitely interested in consolidating our conversational channels
and reducing fragmentation, but I have substantial reservations about
taking this particular step:
* The majority of information overwhelm in my PyPA-related life is
because of GitHub repo and issue sprawl -- if we're going to put energy
into pruning sprawling communications venues, I would prefer that we
spend some time inventorying all the teams, shutting some down, and
locking noisy issues/repositories.
* I would like to know, of our ~700 list members, how many of them have
serious problems using Discourse -- accessibility, user experience,
sheer tech problems, etc. I suspect that we have several members in that
category, some who contribute to packaging, some who lurk so they can
stay apprised and bridge to other communities (distributions, major
packages, etc.).
On Discourse I've seen
https://discuss.python.org/t/disappointed-and-overwhelmed-by-discourse/982
, https://discuss.python.org/t/if-mailing-list-mode-were-better/3951 ,
and https://discuss.python.org/t/e-mail-settings-are-not-respected/396
talking about problems people have had keeping up with/watching and
participating in conversations on Discourse -- including Paul Moore and
Paul Ganssle, whose opinions I really want to hear from here. I believe
I've heard Dan Ryan say that he finds Discourse practically unusable,
and I'd like to hear from him as well.
* There are some things I don't like about how Discourse shapes our
conversations. Some examples: I think people are chattier on Discourse,
posting shorter replies more frequently, and that's not always good. In
the email notifications, Discourse preserves threading so I can see
better who's replying to whom, but the web view is flat which makes that
harder to see. And -- as came up in
https://discuss.python.org/t/pep-458-secure-pypi-downloads-with-package-signing/2648/30
-- people use the heart/"like" button in different ways that have led to
confusion. “Liking” a post on Discourse does not have clear semantics.
It could mean “I like how you expressed this” or “I’m glad you spoke” or
“welcome” or “yes, please do the things you have proposed, I approve"
and there's no way of telling without explicit explanation.
* Discourse is written in Ruby and I have rarely seen Discourse
developers interact with us, and I don't believe I've ever seen (in the
"Discourse feedback" threads above) any Python community member saying
that they could try to fix a problem we were seeing with Discourse. The
more we lock in to using Discourse and moving away from Mailman --
written in Python 3 and now with a web frontend that includes search,
posting, and threaded archive views -- the more we give up control of
our tools.
What if we bridged them, instead? Barry Warsaw in
https://discuss.python.org/t/disappointed-and-overwhelmed-by-discourse/982/15
suggested:
My ultimate dream would be to add an IMAP and/or NNTP interface directly to
[Mailman 3/HyperKitty]. Then I could use my normal mail application to catch up
and interact with Mailman lists in a very lightweight way, driven entirely by
my own workflow. That plus a Discourse bridge would be a pretty powerful and
flexible combination.
Is that something that other folks here who have trouble with Discourse
would find fruitful? If so, we can start pushing to make it happen.
--
Sumana Harihareswara
Changeset Consulting
https://changeset.nyc
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