I know this is no shock to Donald, but I agree with what he brings up below. One of motivators for trying out python.zulipchat.com is to see if it's real-time nature on top of topic-based discussion could act as a cross-section for email and IRC.
For me, either something like Zulip or Discourse takes care of a lot of the issues raised. They provide modern tooling, allow for a central place to communicate, and allow for sectioning things into streams/sections to prevent overwhelming e.g. a single mailing list. On Fri, Apr 20, 2018, 19:08 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. > > 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 >
_______________________________________________ Distutils-SIG maillist - Distutils-SIG@python.org https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/distutils-sig
