CPython release announcements

Core Development
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CPython release notes are currently posted to:

We’ve been retiring mailing lists in favour of Discourse (python-dev, python-committers, typing-sig, python-ideas, translations).

We’re not planning on retiring python-announce and python-list, but to reduce manual work during the release process, we will soon stop sending the release announcements to the mailing lists. We will continue to post them on Discourse, the blog and download pages.

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I wonder if there’s a way to tag a Discourse post in a way that gets it sent to those lists by Discourse? That might be at risk of abuse though…

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I’d reconsider this plan. After all, the purpose of announcements is to spread the word widely, so the more channels, the better.

I’d also add the PSF LinkedIn page to the list, since that’s where corporates will notice.

BTW: Wouldn’t it make sense to get Marie from PSF communications (riecatnor) to help you with this ?

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The migration away from python-list seem pretty compete, but python-announce does have that very specific purpose - and it seems people are still using it

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I know that some people use DPO via email–is it possible to start a topic via email[1]? If so, one way to reduce work would be to announce via an email that goes to both DPO and the mailing list.

  1. it looks like Discourse allows this but it might require configuration here ↩︎

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I expect it would be possible to build an integration that checks for post in certain categories with certain tags by certain people. The thing is, the Discourse post is in Markdown and the manual reformatting to plain text for email is the tedious manual work.

Looks possible with a lot of configuration (and we’d also have to make sure it’s not open to spam/abuse), but likewise, the main issue is Markdown vs. plaintext.

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You can send HTML emails and maintain the formatting, but if you want to include a plain text MIME part as well, you can let pandoc take care of the conversion. It’s pretty decent at generating nice plain text output from markdown.

FWIW: I simply write such announcements as HTML email and then let Thunderbird do the text conversion. For distribution I use the Mail Merge add-on. That way you keep full control over where those announcements are sent, how they look and when they are sent.

If you prefer writing the original announcement in Markdown, pandoc is your friend again :slight_smile: Discourse’s editor can ingest both HTML and Markdown.

Adding social media to the mix can be done using one of the many commercial tools for this or (using open source and a lot of configuration work) via Postiz.

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Can the announcement on the mailing list simply be a short text telling people to check DPO for the details, instead of rewriting all the details in different format?

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Part of the reason Markdown caught on was supposedly that it’s still readable even if it’s not converted to HTML. Discourse does seem to support some kind of extended formatting though (like the quote above) which isn’t part of Markdown per se.

Anyway, given that this is only for specific kinds of posts, wouldn’t it be possible to just make sure these announcement posts don’t use any complex Markdown formatting? If they include stuff like *emphasis* that just shows up as plaintext in an email that would seem fine. Discourse-specific extensions like quotes presumably won’t be necessary for such announcements anyway.

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I’m a fan of pandoc and am using it already! I use it to convert the Markdown into HTML to paste into Blogger instead of using its painful and incredibly dated WYSIWYG interface.

I also use it to convert Markdown into plaintext for the emails, but the big problem is that it cannot convert inline links [label](https://example.com) into plain text; it strips away the URL leaving only the label.

I wonder, could this be automated? Look for posts in a certain category with certain tags by certain people. Or using the blog’s existing RSS feed?

Yeah, Markdown is usually readable as plaintext. Although inline links aren’t pretty. And I sometimes use HTML tags, which could either look odd or be handled in an unknown manner.

It would be possible but the notes can be long and I wouldn’t want to tie our hands if there’s some formatting that would otherwise help us. And again, inline links are somewhat complex…

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You can make this work using the pandoc options --reference-links --reference-location=block

It’s not as nice as e.g. footnotes in Markdown, but at least the URLs don’t get lost :slight_smile:

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As a follow-up:

The options I mentioned do work with the -t plain target, even though they are not documented to do so.

Perplexity pointed me to another nice solution:

Create a LUA file called `keep-links.lua`…

function Link(el)
    local full_text = pandoc.utils.stringify(el.content)
    return pandoc.Str(full_text .. " (" .. el.target .. “)”)
end

and then use pandoc -t plain -t plain --lua-filter=keep-links.lua

This will keep the link text and add the URL in parens behind it.

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