[Catalog-sig] Poll started

[M.-A. Lemburg]

"Martin v. Löwis" wrote:
> M.-A. Lemburg wrote:
>> "Martin v. Löwis" wrote:
>>>>> I'll announce it more widely tomorrow.
>>>> I think the poll is missing an important option:
>>>>
>>>> [ ] Allow package owners to disallow comments and/or ratings.
>>> :-( Why didn't you add this to the wiki page in the past days?
>>
>> Sorry about that: Last time I looked on that page the voting section
>> wasn't there yet.
>>
>>> I actually don't understand the option: what is and/or?
>>
>> Package owners should get two checkboxes:
>>
>>  [ ] Allow comments
>>  [ ] Allow ratings
>>
>> That's about as open as it can get. The only question left then
>> is what to use as default.
> 
> I think it's too late now, now that the poll has started.

It's just a poll to get a feeling for user sentiments, not a vote
of any kind. Even as poll it will be difficult to interpret the
responses to guide the development.

These are the current figures:

"""
Allow ratings and comments on all packages (status quo)	76
Allow package owners to disallow comments (ratings unmodified).	67
Allow comments, but only send them to package owners (ratings unmodified).	18
Disallow comments (ratings unmodified).	15
Disallow ratings and comments (status three months ago).	68
"""

Now let's say you leave the current implementation in place.
This would mean that you satisfy the user feelings of 76
users, but also means that you don't respect the answers
of 168 users - even though the poll makes it look like keeping
the status quo is getting a slight majority.

> Also, I didn't hear anybody say that they wanted to opt out of
> ratings - people opposed to ratings always wanted to turn ratings
> off entirely, as they felt it was a useless way of communicating,
> or not appropriate for PyPI, etc.

I think the best way to handle all this is by giving the
package authors the choice of whether to accept ratings
or comments as two separate check-boxes.

If you then use the status of three months ago as default
(ie. rating and comments are turned off by default), you'd
avoid all the controversy these features have caused.

It's also a good idea to provide a check-box to disable sending
out emails to the authors for comments. And if you want to make
the users who answered "Allow comments, but only send them to package
owners" happy, also add an option to keep comments private.

That said, I still believe that PyPI should stay the neutral place
for uploading packages.

We already have enough controversy trying to sort out the whole
package installation story. IMHO, it's not really useful to
open up another can of worms right now.

-- 
Marc-Andre Lemburg
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