[Python-ideas] From mailing list to GitHub issues

[Guido van Rossum]

I don't have time to respond at length, but I would just like to mention
that I'm actually pretty tired of email threads getting off the rails and
wouldn't mind looking at other approaches, including possibly a dedicated
GitHub tracker (*not* the cpython or peps repo's tracker). There are other
possible solutions too, e.g. discourse or MailMan3 + HyperKitty.

Like Chris, I live in my inbox and everything of importance must come
through there or I won't know about it, but that doesn't imply to me that
it's the best way to manage discussions. I frequently go to the website
(e.g. GitHub, bugs.python.org, discourse) for a better UI to peruse and
manage a discussion.

A few projects I'm on have no mailing list, only GitHub trackers, and they
seem to work well for a variety of purposes, including newbie help, bugs,
philosophical discussions, and debates on the future shape of  specific
features. It takes away the whole "is this a bug or is it a feature"
insecurity that many people have before posting to a tracker (often out of
fear of annoying the developers) -- you just post to the tracker and
someone will triage it, and your head won't be bitten off.

That's all I have time for.

On Sat, Aug 13, 2016 at 8:41 AM, Chris Angelico <rosuav at gmail.com> wrote:

> 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
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-- 
--Guido van Rossum (python.org/~guido)
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