On 18/09/18 23:37, James Lu wrote:
Other than that, my biggest issues with the current mailing system are:
* There’s no way to keep a updated proposal of your own- if you decide to
change your proposal, you have to communicate the change. Then, if you want to
find the authoritative current copy, since you might’ve forgotten or you want
to join he current discussion, then you have to dig through the emails and
recursively apply the proposed change. It’s just easier if people can have one
proposal they can edit themselves.
Believe it or not, I like the fact that you can't just edit posts. I've
lost count of the number of forum threads I've been on where comments to
the initial post make *no sense* because that initial post is nothing
like it was to start with.
(Also it makes it easier to quote people back at themselves :-)
* I’ve seen experienced people get confused about what was the current
proposal because they were replying to older emails or they didn’t see the
email with the clear examples.
As you said yourself, "you have to communicate the change." Even in a
forum or similar. Just editing your post and expecting people to notice
is not going to cut it. And yes, there is a danger that even
experienced people will get confused about what is being proposed right
now, but I've seen that happen on forums too. The lack of threading
tends to help with that, but on the other hand it stifles breadth of debate.
* The mailing list is frankly obscure. Python community leaders and package
maintainers often are not aware or do not participate in Python-ideas. Not many
people know how to use or navigate a mailing list.
* No one really promotes the mailing list, you have to go out of your way to
find where new features are proposed.
* Higher discoverability means more people can participate, providing their
own use cases or voting (I mean using like or dislike measures, consensus
should still be how things are approved) go out of their way to find so they
can propose something. Instead, I envision a forum where people can read and
give their 2 cents about what features they might like to see or might not want
to see.
-1. (I'm British, I'm allowed to be ironic.)
Approximately none of this has anything to do with the medium. If the
mailing list is obscure (and personally I don't think it is), it just
needs better advertising. A poorly advertised forum is equally
undiscoverable.
* More people means instead of having to make decisions from sometimes
subjective personal experience, we can make decisions with confidence in what
other Python devs want.
Um. Have you read this list? Mostly we can make decisions with
confidence that people disagree vigorously about what they as Python
devs want.
Besides, I've never met a mailing list, forum or any group of more than
about twelve people that could make decisions in a timely manner (or at
all in some cases), and I've been a member of a few that were supposed
to. Eventually some*one* has to decide to do or allow something,
traditionally the BDFL.
Since potential proposers will find it easier to navigate a GUI forum, they can
read previous discussions to understand the reasoning, precedent behind
rejected and successful features. People proposing things that have already
been rejected before can be directed to open a subtopic on the older discussion.
Your faith in graphical interfaces is touching, but I've seen some
stinkers. It is no easier to go through the average forum's thousands
of prior discussions looking for the topic you are interested in than it
is to go through the mailing list archive (and frankly googling is your
best bet for both). People don't always do it here, but they don't
always do it on any of the forums I'm on either, and resurrecting a
moribund thread is no different to resurrecting a moribund topic.
--
Rhodri James *-* Kynesim Ltd
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