[Python-ideas] From mailing list to GitHub issues

[Guido van Rossum]

On Sat, Aug 13, 2016 at 3:33 PM, John Wong <gokoproject at gmail.com> wrote:

> Whether it's Mozilla, Python or Cloud Foundry, Apache Cassandra, what not,
> from my experience, the most meaningful discussion always happens over
> email and over some kind of personal messaging platform, e.g. IRC or Slack.
>

That's an odd juxtaposition, and not true in my experience. I've always
hated IRC's culture (too much sniping and too much noise, and an
intentional lack of records). While many operational decisions in the
Python world are indeed taken on IRC (if that's where the few folks who
need to take action on some issue get together), anything that requires
some kind of long-lasting record does not belong there. At work I use Slack
extensively but again it only works for things that people who aren't
online at that very moment can safely skip; for everything else we either
create documents that are cooperatively edited, or use trackers or mailing
lists (and often all three :-).

In the mypy world we simply don't have mailing lists; instead we use three
GitHub trackers for everything (one for mypy, one for typeshed, and one for
PEP-484 and the typing module). We have many excellent discussions there
(in addition to bug reports and triage).

In the Python world many meaningful discussions happen in bugs.python.org,
as python-ideas is often too polarized to be of much use (the current
thread being no exception), while python-dev more and more becomes an
"official" channel to be avoided until a decision has already been
negotiated elsewhere (stuff I post there runs a serious risk of being
quoted out of context in media channels I've never heard of).

In terms of putting barriers in place of newbie contributions, mailing
lists appear more problematic than GitHub trackers, given how often we get
a reply to a digest or an indecipherable jumble of quoting. Trackers also
effectively avoid top-posting issues (which no amount of referring to
mailing list etiquette can prevent).

Note that all these alternatives still send email notifications (to those
who want them), and trackers (including GitHub) also allow replies by email.

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