Hi Kevin, I often feel the same way. Are you using GMail? It combines related messages in threads and lets you mute threads. I often use this feature so I can manage my inbox. (I presume other mailers have the same features, but I don't know if all of them do.) There are also many people who read the list on a website, e.g. gmane. (Though I think that sometimes the delays incurred there add to the noise -- e.g. when a decision is reached on the list sometimes people keep responding to earlier threads.)
--Guido (don't get me started on top-posting :-) On Thu, Jun 16, 2016 at 12:22 PM, Kevin Ollivier < kevin-li...@theolliviers.com> wrote: > Hi all, > > Recent joiner here, I signed up after PyCon made me want to get more > involved and have been lurking. I woke up this morning again to about 30 > new messages in my inbox, almost all of which revolve around the os.urandom > blocking discussion. There are just about hourly new posts showing up on > this topic. > > > > > There is such a thing as too much of a good thing. Discussion of issues is > certainly good, but so far since joining this list I am seeing too much > discussion happening too fast, and as someone who has been involved in open > source for approaching two decades now, frankly, that is not really a good > sign. The discussions are somewhat overlapping as so many people write back > so quickly, there are multiple sub-discussions happening at once, and > really at this point I'm not sure how much new each message is really > adding, if anything at all. It seems to me the main solutions to this > problem have all been identified, as have the tradeoffs of each. The > discussion is now mostly at a point where people are just repeatedly > debating (or promoting) the merits of their preferred solution and > tradeoff. It is even spawning more abstract sub-discsussions about things > like project compatibility policies. This discussion has really taken on a > life of its own. > > For someone like me, a new joiner, seeing this makes me feel like wanting > to simply unsubscribe. I've been on mailing lists where issues get debated > endlessly, and at some point what inevitably happens is that the project > starts to lose members who feel that even just trying to follow the > discussions is eating up too much of their time. It really can suck the > energy right out of a community. I don't want to see that happen to Python. > I had a blast at PyCon, my first, and I really came away feeling more than > ever that the community you have here is really special. The one problem I > felt concerned about though, was that the core dev community risked a sense > of paralysis caused by having too many cooks in the kitchen and too much > worry about the potential unseen ramifications of changing things. That > creates a sort of paralysis and difficulty achieving consensus on anything > that, eventually, causes projects to slowly decline and be disrupted by a > more agile alternative. > > Please consider taking a step back from this issue. Take a deep breath, > and consider responding more slowly and letting people's points stew in > your head for a day or two first. (Including this one pls. :) Python will > not implode if you don't get that email out right away. If I understand > what I've read of this torrent of messages correctly, we don't even know if > there's a single real world use case where a user of os.urandom is hitting > the same problem CPython did, so we don't even know if the blocking at > startup issue is actually even happening in any real world Python code out > there. It's clearly far from a rampant problem, in any case. Stop and think > about that for a second. This is, in practice, potentially a complete > non-issue. Fixing it in any number of ways may potentially change things > for no one at all. You could even introduce a real problem while trying to > fix a hypothetical one. There are more than enough real problems to deal > with, so why push hypothetical problems to t > he top of your priority list? > > It's too easy to get caught up in the abstract nature of problems and to > lose sight of the real people and code behind them, or sometimes, the lack > thereof. Be practical, be pragmatic. Before you hit that reply button, > think - in a practical sense, of all the things I could be doing right now, > is this discussion the place where my involvement could generate the > greatest positive impact for the project? Is this the biggest and most > substantial problem the project should be focusing on right now? Projects > and developers who know how to manage focus go on to achieve the greatest > things, in my experience. > > Having been critical, I will end with a compliment. :) It is nice to see > that with only a couple small exceptions, this discussion has remained very > civil and respectful, which should be expected, but I know from experience > that far too often these discussions start to take a nasty tone as people > get frustrated. This is one of the things I really do love about the Python > community, and it's one reason I want to see both the product and community > grow and succeed even more. That, in fact, is why I'm choosing to write > this message first rather than simply unsubscribe. > > Kevin > > _______________________________________________ > Python-Dev mailing list > Python-Dev@python.org > https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-dev > Unsubscribe: > https://mail.python.org/mailman/options/python-dev/guido%40python.org > -- --Guido van Rossum (python.org/~guido)
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