On Wed, 8 Feb 2023 at 20:20, William Stein <wst...@gmail.com> wrote: > > Many thanks for sharing this from the *developer* point of view. I'm very > much thinking about this problem entirely from the end-user-of-sage point > of view (i.e., me right now). Did you also encounter problems using > discussions with sympy from the end user point of view?
I don't personally like the format(s) but I haven't seen users having problems with the interface itself. The quality of dialogue/interaction with users there is low though. The threads that have a reasonable dialogue are actually just developers talking to each other rather than users getting their questions answered. > Glancing at the sympy Discussions at > > https://github.com/sympy/sympy/discussions > > I had a positive impression, since there's a lot of activity, with > questions clearly marked "answered", etc. > So thanks for sharing how painful that can be from the dev side. What won't be obvious from a distance is that all of the people answering the questions are the same people who would normally respond to issues and would submit or review pull requests etc. In fact many of the people asking the questions are also people who are submitting pull requests so many are not really "user" questions. The mailing list has broader reach and there questions usually get asked and answered in the first instance by people who are not maintainers (more like "power users"). Likewise there are many people who answer questions on StackOverflow but who have little or no involvement on GitHub. The implication then is that Discussions can provide a support channel that is only watched by maintainers. Partly that's bad because it places additional burden on those maintainers but also compared to a mailing list it has no sense of community and no wider discussion. There are no other users watching the questions and answers and either learning from them or contributing their own solutions or follow up questions. That's also a loss because I think that other "users" will often have a very different perspective from the small group of maintainers and I think that community building is more important than providing immediate Q+A. -- Oscar -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "sage-devel" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to sage-devel+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/sage-devel/CAHVvXxRuAT6nBu6-dbGKBmJqsQqJgABV9HA7GLv0se2ivHcy-w%40mail.gmail.com.
