[Python-ideas] From mailing list to GitHub issues

[Oleg Broytman]

Good addition, makes me think. Thank you!

On Sat, Aug 13, 2016 at 01:16:01PM -0400, Donald Stufft <donald at stufft.io> wrote:
> 
> > On Aug 13, 2016, at 12:36 PM, Oleg Broytman <phd at phdru.name> wrote:
> > 
> > The advantages of email:
> 
> I think one of the big trade offs here, is that the traditional mailing list can work very well if everyone involved takes the time to develop a custom tool chain that fits their own workflow perfectly and if they spend the time learning the deficiency of the systems to ensure they correctly work around them. The web forum thing can theoretically achieve much less of a theoretical ???maximum??? for productivity, but it typically means that you can bring productivity gains to those who can???t or won???t spend time maintaining a custom mailing stack. 
> 
> Essentially it becomes a trade off between losing some of the flexibility/productivity for a handful of people in exchange for boosting productivity for most other folks.
> 
> One of the big problems with mailing lists is that you have no control over the clients, so you can???t really achieve anything more robust than whatever the lowest common denominator is for all mail clients that are participating in the discussion. An examples:
> 
> A thread is going off the rails and we wish to redirect them to a new topic or list while either closing the old topic or allowing discussion to continue in the original topic. With the traditional mailing list, your only real options are to tell people to stop and??? hope they do that? Except that becomes a problem because people???s email can be severely delayed, people miss messages, etc. I have yet to see a mailing list where someone didn???t accidentally post something to the wrong place, and then you end up having 10+ people all scolding them for posting in the wrong place, meanwhile you have some people answering the question anyways, and it becomes a huge mess. Compare this to the experience with a web forum where you can just move the existing thread immediately, and/or redirect people to a new location and optionally close the old thread to no longer allow posting.

   From the recent and not so recent discussions of Moxi Marlinspike
about centralized vs decentralized solutions (unfederated messaging vs
email/jabber): "Indeed, cannibalizing a federated application-layer
protocol into a centralized service is almost a sure recipe for a
successful consumer product today. It's what Slack did with IRC, what
Facebook did with email, and what WhatsApp has done with XMPP. In each
case, the federated service is stuck in time, while the centralized
service is able to iterate into the modern world and beyond.".

https://whispersystems.org/blog/the-ecosystem-is-moving/

   The problem for me is that it's about consumers while I prefer to
deal with powerful users.

> I can go on and on, but by having some control over the client, these systems are able to add additional features that make the baseline UX of discussion much better, though perhaps worse for individual users who are willing to spend time carefully crafting their own experience. Consider that almost every advantage you listed for email, could also be considered a disadvantage in that because each of those things are _possible_, that the tooling has to attempt to handle all of those things sanely.
> 
> ???
> Donald Stufft

Oleg.
-- 
     Oleg Broytman            http://phdru.name/            phd at phdru.name
           Programmers don't die, they just GOSUB without RETURN.