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On Sun, May 6, 2018, 5:33 AM Pradyun Gedam <pradyu...@gmail.com> wrote: > Sorry for poking an old thread. I actually wanted to respond earlier but > life got in the way. > > Just a small point though. > > On Sat, Apr 21, 2018 at 7:37 AM Donald Stufft <don...@stufft.io> wrote: > >> Currently in the packaging space, we have a number of avenues for >> communication, which are: >> >> - distutils-sig >> - pypa-dev >> - virtualenv-users >> - Other project specific mailing lists >> - IRC >> - gitter >> - Various issue trackers spread across multiple platforms. >> - Probably more places I’m not remembering. >> >> The result of this is that all discussion ends up being super fractured >> amongst the various places. Sometimes that is exactly what you want (for >> instance, someone who is working on the wheel specs probably doesn’t care >> about deprecation policy and internal module renaming in pip) and sometimes >> that ends up being the opposite of what you want (for instance, when you’re >> describing something that touches PyPI, setuptools, flit, pip, etc all at >> once). >> >> Theoretically the idea is that distutils-sig is where cross project >> reaching stuff goes, IRC/gitter is where real time discussion goes, and the >> various project mailing lists and issue trackers are where the project >> specific bits go. The problem is that often times doesn’t actually happen >> in practice except for the largest and most obvious of changes. >> > > For real time discussions, something like pypa/discuss and > pypa/dev-discuss (or some other spelling) on gitter, bridged to #pypa and > #pypa-dev would allow us to merge those two channels. That would be nice. > > It seems that Julia does something like this: > https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/julia-users/ImKYzqHXA90 > > I think our current “communications stack” kind of sucks, and I’d love to >> figure out a better way for us to handle this that solves the sort of weird >> “independent but related” set of projects we have here. >> >> From my POV, a list of our major problems are: >> >> * Discussion gets fractured across a variety of platforms and locations, >> which can make it difficult to actually keep up with what’s going on but >> also to know how to loop in someone relevant if their input would be >> valuable. You have to more or less simultaneously know someone’s email, >> Github username, IRC nick, bitbucket username, etc to be able to bring >> threads of discussion to people’s attention. >> >> * It’s not always clear to users where a discussion should go, often >> times they’ll come to one location and need to get redirected to another >> location. If any discussion did happen in the incorrect location, it tends >> to need to get restarted in the new location (and depending on the specific >> platform, it may be impossible to actually redirect everyone over to the >> proper location, so you again, end up fractured with the discussion >> happening in two places). >> >> * A lot of the technology in this stack is particularly old, and lacks a >> lot of the modern day affordances that newer things have. An example is >> being able to edit a discussion post to fix typos that can hinder the >> ability of others to actually understand whats being talked about. In your >> typical mailing list or IRC there’s no mechanism by which you can edit an >> already sent message, so your only option is to either let the problem ride >> and hope it doesn’t trip up too many people, or send an additional message >> to correct the error. However these show up as additional, later messages >> which someone might not even see until they’ve already been thoroughly >> confused by the first message (since people tend to read email/IRC in a >> linear fashion). >> - There is a lot of things in this one, other things are things like >> being able to control in a more fine grained manner what email you’re going >> to get. >> - Holy crap, formatting and typography to make things actually readable >> and not a big block of plaintext. >> >> * We don’t have a clear way for users to get help, leaving users to treat >> random issues, discussion areas, etc as a support forum, rather than some >> place that’s actually optimized for that. Some of this ties back into some >> of the earlier things too, where it’s hard to actually redirect discussions >> >> These aren’t *new* problems, and often times the existing members of a >> community are the least effected becasue they’ve already spent effort >> learning the ins and outs and also curating a (typically custom) workflow >> that they’ve grown accustomed too. The problem with that is that often >> times that means that new users are left out, and the community gets >> smaller and smaller as time goes on as people leave and aren’t replaced >> with new blood, because they’re driven off but the issues with the stack. >> >> A big part of the place this is coming from, is me sitting back and >> realizing that I tend to be drawn towards pulling discussions into Github >> issues rather than onto the varying mailing lists, not because that’s >> always the most appropriate place for it, but because it’s the least >> painful place in terms of features and functionality. I figure if I’m doing >> that, when I already have a significant investment in setting up tooling >> and being involved here, that others (and particularly new users) are >> likely feeling the same way. >> >> - Donald >> >> _______________________________________________ >> Distutils-SIG maillist - Distutils-SIG@python.org >> https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/distutils-sig >> > > -- > Pradyun > -- > Distutils-SIG mailing list > distutils-sig@python.org > https://mail.python.org/mm3/mailman3/lists/distutils-sig.python.org/ > Message archived at > https://mail.python.org/mm3/archives/list/distutils-sig@python.org/message/D22ANLILNOQCU5M536P5ONGSFDBL57SY/ >
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