On Wed, Apr 6, 2011 at 1:13 AM, Terry Reedy <[email protected]> wrote: > But it seems to me likely biased, so I am not convinced yet.
There is not and never will be a sampling of "end users" that will be widely accepted by this list. This is a fact that we need to accept and move past, largely because such sampling is a red herring. > An avalanche follows. It mostly consists of people who did not ratings > before saying they do not like ratings now, and perhaps even less. Surprise. > And there is some rehashing of the same old arguments. When I look at this and the original threads, I see a variety of opinions. There are people (I'm one of them) who feel PyPI should not be in the business of hosting a rating system, and should simply stick to being the Python Package Index. There are people who feel there could be a useful rating implementation, but that the one PyPI has is not such an implementation. And there's Martin. There seems to be virtually universal agreement that -- if PyPI is to host ratings -- the current implementation is flawed at best. This is a strong argument for scrapping the implementation and doing the legwork to get something that's actually demonstrably helpful. It is not an argument for keeping the status quo. But that, ultimately, is what the problem is here. What we're seeing is not a debate or discussion. What we're seeing is one person with authority -- Martin -- stonewalling the rest of the community in an attempt to preserve the status quo. No amount of polling of users will establish the utility or desirability of ratings; we've seen ample evidence of that in the fact that A) allegedly ratings are popular enough to win a poll, but B) ratings are so unpopular that practically nobody actually submits ratings. Suggestions of further polling are simply a stalling tactic, dragging this out long enough that the people who don't like ratings will simply give up from frustration or exhaustion, at which point things stay as they are. Add to that the fact that, as I've repeatedly pointed out, package maintainers -- the people who make PyPI worthwhile -- are essentially being told that their concerns will be ignored, and that any arguments package maintainers make against ratings (or, in the beginning, comments -- remember, when we asked for the ability to toggle them we were equated to government censors) were simply shouted down as a failure on *our* part to compromise, and, well, this isn't a pretty picture. This is a horrifically dysfunctional way to manage a valuable community resource. It needs to stop. It needs to stop now. I don't care how bad a taste that ends up leaving in someone's mouth, or how many emails René has to passive-aggressively complain about receiving. I care about the future of PyPI and the communities -- BOTH developers and end users -- it serves, and right now that future looks awfully empty. -- "Bureaucrat Conrad, you are technically correct -- the best kind of correct." _______________________________________________ Catalog-SIG mailing list [email protected] http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/catalog-sig
