[Catalog-sig] More problems with the comments system...

[Martijn Faassen]

Martin v. Löwis wrote:
>> In this discussion, I placed a comment in the zope.app.sqlscript thread
>> to point to more modern ways to integrate the Zope Toolkit with
>> relational databases. This comment (along with many others) is now lost
>> because the original person deleted his comment and then recreated it.
> 
> It's not completely lost, as there still is a log of it somewhere. So if
> you need the actual text, please let me know.

Thanks, but that isn't a problem.

>> The current design therefore gives the commenter the power to destroy
>> responses by package owners. And...
> 
> That's true, and unfortunate. Can you propose an alternative approach
> (short of removing the comment facility altogether)?

Perhaps when someone removes their comment it will say "comment removed" 
(and the commenter's name could be eliminated as well). The followups 
would remain in-tact this way. That isn't the complete context of course 
for future readers, but better than nothing.

>>> - Because I'm marked as a "Package Index Owner", I can't rate or
>>> independently comment on this package, even though I'm not its
>>> maintainer, I'm just someone who's volunteered to take responsibility
>>> for releasing a load of zope-related eggs when no-one else is around.
>> Happened to me too.
> 
> Not sure what exactly happened: that you wanted to rate, and couldn't,
> or that you wanted to comment, and couldn't?

I wanted to comment, but couldn't. I can only reply to comments as a 
package owner, not create new comments.

> Why would you want to comment on the package, when you can put whatever
> you want to say into the packages' page?

I wanted to comment on the package itself, because my comment got 
removed in a comment on a comment. I wanted to put this information back in.

Of course often updating the long description is an alternative to doing 
so. But this would have been quite a bit more work than placing a 
comment; the long description of this package is generated by setup.py 
of the package, and it'd meant having to check out the package and doing 
a new description upload. I just wanted to spend a minute to provide 
helpful information.

[snip]
>> If comment disabling is implemented, I think a nice feature might be to
>> repeat the author email metadata in its place (or perhaps a special
>> metadata field for diccussion forums). This way someone who wants to
>> comment on the package gets a clear indication of where they can to go.
> 
> This I cannot understand. Can you rephrase?

If it's possible to disable comments on a per-package basis, it might be 
useful to say in the UI:

"If you want to comment on this package, please use the following forum: 
<mailing list address or http link>."

This would need sufficient metadata in the package to describe such 
discussion forums. I'm not sure whether author email is enough, but 
perhaps other metadata fields apply.

But perhaps there's a better idea than that: it would be useful to 
provide a "feedback" functionality for a package. This is separate from 
comments: comments are meant to be read by others. Feedback is supposed 
to go to the package maintainers but doesn't need to be shown.

Regards,

Martijn