The current channels we have do not quite semantically support certain kinds of topics such as announcements. If a release manager or maintainer of a certain package wanted to announce release of a new version for it, I don’t think there’s a channel on here that they could announce from. Maybe if it were an async library then they’d announce in async-sig, or if it were a webassembly package then they’d announce in webassembly, but otherwise there’s no channel for people to announce new releases of projects like cython, numpy, scipy, kivy etc. It’d be nice if we had a channel for the community to just announce project releases in a general way
6 Likes
I’ve thought about this a little myself, and I’ve noticed that packaging has some announcement threads but the other subforums don’t.
I think the main issues with the idea are:
- where does it go?
- would it actually be useful?
I’d enjoy sharing new projects of mine and asking for feedback, but I also know that the board would probably be flooded with many project ideas of varying quality. Would I want to read such a forum?
I’m not sure. I’d like seeing updates like the mypy changelog, I’d be neutral/mostly ignore updates to major projects I don’t use, but a large number of “hey I just released version 1.0 of my cool new tool” posts could get tiresome.
I’m not sure if this has been discussed before – I feel it must have but I can’t recall. This might belong in the Discourse Feedback area, rather than Ideas.
In any case, thanks for opening the discussion!
5 Likes
In the days before discourse there was python-announce. Looks some people are still sending announcements there:
https://mail.python.org/archives/list/python-announce-list@python.org/
4 Likes
As an admin of python-announce, I’d be okay with archiving it and creating a discourse topic (or whatever they’re called) to replace it. We’ve done it with other mailing lists. Although I suspect we’d lose many or even most of the people who are on python-announce. We e accepted that with other lists.
5 Likes
I move this to Discourse Feedback since it’s about this side and not the python language. Something like this has been suggested a few times before. The two decently sized and easily findable once are these, but I am sure there are more:
Not really sure why nothing ever happened, it seems the community doesn’t quite have a consensus that this is a good idea.
2 Likes
If there was a discourse announce topic would it be possible to send the announcements by email?
I’m not sure how you see the email headers in mailman 3 but I would imagine that many of those announce messages have the announce list in CC and are also being sent to some other mailing list. Or they might be being sent in some semi-automatic way.
What would be the purpose exactly? Read random announcements from random Python projects among the thousands of them (at least) that are actively developed?
I understand that python-announce-list could be useful when it was created more than 20 years ago, in a very small and tightly knit ecosystem. But today?
PyPI projects ordered by last release time should give a feel for how much traffic this channel could receive if it was widely used as described (new projects and releases). The channel would become write only.
3 Likes
Random is subjective I would say. I mean their are thousands of python packages out there so it’s not practical for one to be interested in all, but their is something for everyone. So one can keep up with what they’re interested in an ignore the rest. It’s also what is already happening on other channels here. No one keeps up with every single thread of topic unless it’s of interest to them.
Wouldn’t it be better in that case to just subscribe to each project of interest’s existing release channels? E.g. a ‘releases’ page on github or the like.
A centralized channel for package release announcements could be useful for users to discover new software they might be interested in, and for developers to get feedback on their software from a wider audience. But that only works if the channel isn’t too noisy.
I agree with bwoodsend that an open-to-all announcement channel could easily become write-only. The traffic of the existing python-announce mailing list is entirely manageable, but would moving it to discourse attract further traffic? I guess the only way to find out is to try.
If traffic were to become unmanagable, could some kind of filter be implemented to automatically limit participation to packages which meet certain criteria, such as minimum monthly downloads on pypi?
2 Likes
Yes, exactly. That, and/or community-specific announcement forums. Not the entire Python ecosystem.
1 Like
Personally, I am in favor of a topic dedicated to package release posts inside the forum.
Let’s put a practical and personal example on the table; I have a package that (in addition to my hours of work spent to make it “ready to production”) in my opinion could improve the life of someone else besides mine. I develop it, test it and publish it on Github/Gitlab. I find the release point and publish it via the release channel of my git remote provider: only those who are subscribed to Github/Gitlab and follow my account will be able to see the release. In a mailing list, practically the same thing happens: those who are subscribed to the mailing list will receive updates (not only mine, but of all those who write in the mailing list) and the replies are (or threads) are read only by those who wrote sometimes.
What happens in a forum like discussion, is very different;
- For the maintainer: I open a new thread on the package release topic. I publish my changes and features. I have direct feedback from users (or not) and everyone can read/share/reply.
- For those who are subscribed: I can reply and comment and help the maintainer and the whole community with examples or with immediate feedback (i.e. I tried this, but the other one is better…)
- For the rest of the world: instead of spending hours searching on search engines that change their results every day and be misleading, I can go to the forum of the language itself and search directly in the right topic; see which package is most used in the community for a certain domain. Subscribe if I’m interested and leave feedback directly to the maintainer (or others).
I’ll give you a practical example on other discuss:
I’m working on MongoDB and I want to write my application so that it interfaces with the no-sql database:
- Go lang: I go to Go → Category → Release → Search → MongoDB → I find in the first topic the discussion on the library I need
- Rust lang: I go to Rust users Forum → Category → announcements → Search → MongoDB → I find in the first topic the discussion on the library I need
- Kotlin lang: I go to Kotlin Forum → Category → Libraries → Search → MongoDB → I find in the first topic the discussion on the library I need
- Python lang: I go to Pypi → Search → MongoDB → I try the first three sorted by Relevance; nothing. Results too discrepant: openid-mongodb, pg-mongodb, pytest-mongodb…I try to sort by date-last-update. Nothing, worse than before. At this point I go to the search engines: I find PyMongo and click the first link: examples without documentation. I try to search for “Pymongo repo”. I find the Github repo and relative docs, but no feedback from users.
Not having an announcements topic for packages slows down the work of finding the right package. It is also an opportunity for the maintainer to make their package known and get immediate feedback from people who use or would like to use the package.
1 Like