Retiring distutils-sig@python.org? (was renaming distutils-sig@python.org to packaging-sig@python.org)

As we move toward getting distutils out of the standard library and toward making it “just one of the options” for build backends, I think it’d be worthwhile for us to do this.

In an ideal world, we’d basically have the mailing list get renamed and “distutils-sig” would become some sort of an alias for that list? I don’t know if that’s even possible. :slight_smile:

The questions I have are:

  • Would it be possible for us to do this?
  • How would we do this while minimizing disruption?

The main issues that I can think of are:

  • Broken email filters.
  • Need for resubscribing if we can’t “auto-move” people (IDK how mailing list management works. :slight_smile:)
  • Outdated references which point to a “now-archived” mailing list that says “use packaging-sig@python.org instead”.

Should we just retire the list in favor of this discourse category? Having two redundant places like this seems, y’know, redundant, and the fact that we’re talking about this here instead of there suggests that maybe it’s outlived its necessity…

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+1, I’m in favor of retiring it entirely.

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+1

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We talked about doing this many years ago, I don’t remember the specific reasons why, but it was ultimately decided that it wasn’t worth the churn. I think there was some technical limitation that made it difficult to do, and it effectively boiled down to making a whole new list and auto subscribing everyone who was subscribed to the old list? Something like that.

I haven’t looked at distutils-sig in quite some time, so I’m certainly in favor of retiring it… but I also don’t really care if it sticks around since I’m not following it either way.

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I strongly suggest that whoever wants to retire distutils-sig suggest
that on distutils-sig.

If you want a template for laying out your reasoning, proposing the
retirement, and giving people a month to object, check out
https://groups.google.com/d/msg/pypa-dev/twf9HCGfv3k/t2HJwzF-AgAJ my
“archive this group & redirect conversation elsewhere?” note in April
which led to us shutting down the pypa-dev Google Group.

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I strongly suggest that whoever wants to retire distutils-sig suggest that on distutils-sig

Indeed! FWIW, I wasn’t thinking of retiring distutils-sig, but now that it’s been mentioned, I’m certainly in favor of doing so.

check out https://groups.google.com/d/msg/pypa-dev/twf9HCGfv3k/t2HJwzF-AgAJ my
“archive this group & redirect conversation elsewhere?”

I’ll go ahead and use this to send an email to distutils-sig. :slight_smile:

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I’ve re-titled this topic to reflect the direction that this discussion has taken.

I’ve posted https://mail.python.org/archives/list/distutils-sig@python.org/thread/VZL5AMZ2WXWVOSAFCBSPH2Q3FLZJDOCS/

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I suspect that this may be helpful information to share with mailing list participants:

I confess that I don’t even know how to subscribe to all threads of a
discourse.

  • How to subscribe to all threads of discourse

Go to the category you care about, e.g.
Packaging - Discussions on Python.org, and if you look in the right
side next to “+ New Topic” you will see a bell. you can click that and
choose to what level you want to follow new topics (only new threads,
notification of all comments, direct notification of all comments, etc.).

-Brett

  1. Go to the category page: e.g. Packaging - Discussions on Python.org
  2. Click the bell at the top right
  3. Select “Watching”

Does this send a new email whenever someone edits a post that’s already been emailed out?

(edit) If you change your notification settings for a particular thread by clicking on the bell, that setting is independent of your category-level setting. So, you can “Watching” all on the category and “Mute” a particular thread or vice-versa.

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A post was split to a new topic: Should this site be listed under “Community” at python.org?