Best comms channel for core dev?

Hi there, I’m – once again – trying to ease myself back into contributing to core Python, probably by doing some housekeeping to start with :slight_smile:

Having been away for some time, I’m rather confused as to what the best channel for communications is. This (discuss.python.org) seems active, so I’m posting here to start with. I’m aware of the python-dev ML. There’s talk of a discord server for core development, but I don’t know how to get there. I’m fairly sure Zulip is no longer used, and I’ve never used IRC so I’m not looking at #python-dev unless someone tells me it’s essential :slight_smile:

So, where’s the best place / places to be if I want to be able to ask (and answer) useful questions in a timely manner?

3 Likes

It depends on where the person with the best answer likes to hang out.
On all of the ones mentioned (except Zulip), someone should at least point you to the right direction.

1 Like

Essential

python-dev and python-committers are where most activity happens. You need to be there to be effective.

Discourse is where a group of us wanted that activity to move but this fell short: the improvements of Discourse weren’t enough to convince mailing list aficionados to switch, since there is some inevitable adaptation curve and perceived feature loss (see xkcd://1172).

Some core developers do prefer Discourse though and post on it more often than on the mailing lists. One particularly popular feature is polling core devs for stuff. So it pays to be here, too.

It’s not great to have two channels and this was discussed this week. No decisions AFAICT.

Helpful

Python Core Devs Discord is pretty confusingly similarly named to Discourse so people keep confusing the two in conversations. What it is is a realtime chat to talk to other core devs. It’s invite-only, available to core devs, triagers, and mentees only. Since it’s not open and timezones make it impossible for everybody to interact on equal terms, nothing really gets decided on it. But if you want to pick somebody’s brain quickly, or poke them to review your pull request, or rant about Linux distributions not using PIE, or show off your new widescreen monitor, this is the place to be :sunglasses:

Note that the Python Core Devs Discord is separate from the massively popular user-oriented Python Discord. I’m there too but it’s unrelated to core development work.

Not important

IRC is legacy. There is few people there and unless they got some Matrix integration, conversations get interrupted and lost when people disconnect. We keep it, I’m on it, but I think it’s fair to say that it died with Freenode.

Zulip is kind of a sad story since it’s written in Python, open source, and kind of fills the same space as Discord. Sadly it didn’t win people’s hearts and so multiple times we discussed whether to continue using it and we finally decided that Zulip failed.

8 Likes

Thanks, @ambv – nice summary.

4 Likes

I plan to be the last IRC user on Earth.

7 Likes

… but it is on the SC’s agenda to discuss this (and probably make a decision).

5 Likes