[Python-ideas] From mailing list to GitHub issues

[Chris Angelico]

On Sun, Aug 14, 2016 at 12:31 AM, Arek Bulski <arek.bulski at gmail.com> wrote:
> I have been a subscriber only for few weeks now but I dont like the mailing
> list at all. First, I get all the topics even tho Windows encoding is not of
> my interest. Second, most of the text is auto quotes anyway. Third, editing
> posts can sometimes be helpful, for correcting typos and such.
>
> I think it would be beneficial to use GitHub issues instead, one for each
> topic and perhaps one for general notifications like announcing new topics
> or forum wide announcements.

Strongly disagree.

Yes, you have to cope with the topics you're not interested in, but a
good email client will help you with that anyway. (In Gmail, for
instance, "Mute this thread" does that for you.) You'd have to deal
with that on *any* forum, so email is no different.

GitHub Issues is *only* good for one purpose, and that is the
management of one repository. You tried to start a general Python
question on the PEPs repository, which isn't right. It emphasizes the
PEP process as if it were the one and only way to discuss Python
ideas, which it most certainly isn't - the vast majority of
python-ideas threads don't result in PEPs.

There are other places where discussion can happen, too. "BPO"
(http://bugs.python.org/) is where changes to Python's core code end
up - it might be moving to GitHub Issues, but if it does, it wouldn't
be part of the PEPs repo, but part of the CPython repo. There's the
python-dev mailing list, where a lot of traffic isn't specifically
about changes to anything at all, but is about general policies and
such. And python-list (aka comp.lang.python) also gets a lot of
discussion, although you'd start a thread on python-list if you expect
the answer to be more of "Here's how you can do that" than "Yes/no, we
will/won't add that to the language". They're unlikely to shift to
GitHub Issues.

Ultimately, email is the best way that I've *ever* seen for discussing
important matters like this. All the others (BPO, GH Issues, etc), and
even social media (eg when Christine sends me a Twitter message),
channel through to email - GitHub sends me an email any time an issue
is created or commented on, etc. Every important discussion I've ever
been involved with has been in one of my email inboxes, with the
possible exception of real-time conversations - which then end up
being ephemeral.

The ONLY benefit you're stating for GH Issues is that it has per-topic
notifications. Those would be broken the instant a discussion begins
to wander, as you get the age-old problem of "is this a reply to that,
or is it a new topic?" (answer: it's both), so I think you'd find the
advantage over email isn't all that great anyway. Get Mozilla
Thunderbird or Squirrel Mail or some other at least half-way decent
mail client, and you should be able to cope with python-ideas.

ChrisA