Re: Archive this list & redirect conversation elsewhere?

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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