Creating a "python-dev" equivalent category

Sorry but this thread must not be restricted to core developers. Discourse admins, again, can we please have a “Python-Dev” category? @pablogsal @ambv and others. (No, this thread doesn’t belong to “Ideas” or “Users” neither.)

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Until a decision is made about the future of discuss.python.org I’m personally not going to create a “Python-Dev” category, especially since I prefer separate categories for language/stdlib and CPython.

I find this very frustrating. We can always rearrange categories later – it’s trivial. Not having useful categories is actively harmful right now. If we want to kill discuss.python.org, then OK, we can do that, but keeping it around but in an intentionally broken state is… frustrating.

Anyway, I moved this topic into “users”, since perpetuating that idea that only core devs are special enough to participate seems like a greater sin than having inappropriate junk cluttering up the users category.

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I agree these multiple forums are confusing. I put the topic in “committers” because it didn’t seem to fit for “users”. It is mostly relevant to modifying the CPython runtime. However, I guess the info could be useful to others. I didn’t realize when I posted that “committers” is locked down to such a small set of readers.

I would have just responded to python-dev (since there is already a thread there) but I wanted to embed screenshots. The coloring of the annotated assembly is helpful.

I moved this to the Discourse Feedback category.

Other @admins can add sections as requested, I’m just personally choosing to focus that kind of effort into council stuff right now and hopefully to help get the PEP written to resolve whether discuss.python.org will stick around (and obviously helping get that PEP written and resolved is of course appreciated).

That’s fine, but I personally find the split between python-committers and discuss.python.org way more frustrating.

I’m glad that people are liking Discourse enough to want to organically expand it to encompass python-dev, but remember it was only meant to initially cover python-committers and the other categories were put there because Lukasz decided to toss up some other stuff (if I remember correctly). The fact that people are using it beyond python-committers wasn’t planned for and that’s why there’s nothing more structured (packaging got added because Donald explicitly asked as the admin for distutils-sig to start moving conversations over). I don’t think the python-dev admins have even said they want to move, so there’s a wider discussion to be had whether this proposed expansion is desired by the wider community (previous discussions about expanding discuss.python.org have suggested not circumventing mailing lists but instead asking if they want to move). Hence why I’m choosing to focus more on the PEP to resolve all the murky bits around this situation rather than try to patch it up (and potentially take flack for trying to expand discuss.python.org without discussing it first).

As it’s expanding, I’m finding that the increased traffic makes it harder to follow threads as easily. It’s quite possible there are better ways of working that I need to identify and embrace, but as things stand, the way that was working for me (basically, working of the “Latest” view) is starting to break down, with no easy way for me to focus on threads that interest me, without completely ignoring “secondary” threads.

Also, the fact that there’s no good way to “mark as unread” something that I glance at and then realise I don’t have time to read in depth, is becoming more and more of a problem as traffic increases :frowning:

So I’m -1 on creating a python-dev category (and the resulting increase in traffic as python-dev discussions spill over to here) until we’re more certain that this is the way we want to go, and have had a chance to write up/identify some “practical workflow advice” for people who are starting with the platform.

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I had to stop following that view and set up appropriate category subscriptions and then occasionally check the cross-site views.

I believe this has come up before and the solution that was found was to bookmark the topic.

I am -1 too.

I hear that focus on discourses was specific to python-committers. I think, that still could be the case, and we should not expand it to replace mailing lists now.

None of the modern tools seem to handle the scale, convenience of emails well for in-depth or prolonged discussion, along with the convenience and configuration of clients that we use. (May be I should try discourse with text only mailing list mode?).

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Sorry for being cranky. I’m not cranky at you.

If I had the appropriate permissions I would just go ahead and add the category myself, but I don’t :frowning:

Nobody in this thread is asking whether we should move discussions here from other venues like python-dev. That’s an important question, but it’s not what this thread is about. The question here is: for the development related discussions that are currently happening here, is it better to:

  1. File them in an appropriate category so people can configure their notifications/etc. appropriately,
  2. File them randomly in inappropriate and confusing categories, and in the process exclude community members from joining the discussion.

Right now we’re doing (2). Do you think we should be doing (1) or (2)?

I think we should be doing (3) - redirect discussions back to the mailing list if they are related to areas that haven’t yet been agreed should be moved to Discourse. That’s what we do when someone posts to the wrong mailing list - why should this be different?

I understand @nas’s point that he wanted to include screenshots (rich text is an improvement over text-only emails) but the mailing list (even with its limitations) is where this sort of discussion happens right now, and I’d rather it was changed as a result of a deliberate discussion and choice, not by accidental drift.

The thread Adding char* based APIs for Unix is another example of something that doesn’t belong in committers.

This discussion is a typical case where everybody agrees that things are broken, but since we can’t agree of a fix, we’ll just leave it broken.

Ah, I’m sorry about it. I thought python-dev is merged into “Committers” category in discourse.
I searched why I thought so… and find this.

I’m mapping discuss.python.org categories to these mailing lists in my head:

  • Committers: python-committers
  • Ideas: python-ideas
  • Users: python-list
  • core-workflow: core-workflow

For me it’s strange to have a gap between ideas and committers: no python-dev.

I’m just personally choosing to focus that kind of effort into council stuff right now and hopefully to help get the PEP written

Which PEP? The one that Barry asked here?
https://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-committers/2019-February/006537.html

Who is working on such PEP or who wants to write such PEP?

Even if a PEP is written, I’m not sure that we will be able to take a decision :slight_smile:

My practical problem is that until a decision is taken, there are more and more committers starting discussions in the Committers category which prevents non-committers to be involved in the discussion. I really dislike that committers have “super power” and exclude other people from discussions :frowning:

We should move these discussions to Users or ask committers to stop using Discourse for discussions who must be open to everybody. As you may have understood, I’m unhappy with the “move to the Users category” trade off :slight_smile:

Small explanation why I’m unhappy with this compromise.

I’m not subscribed to python-list nor python-ideas on purpose. Right now, I don’t have the bandwidth to follow these lists. I prefer to stick to python-dev. But because of the lack of python-dev category, I get a notification for new discussions in the Users category :frowning: Example of new Users discussion (it has been posted in the correct category :wink:):

Can an @admins please add a new python-dev category?

just semantnically, naming it python-dev wouldn’t really fit the current category naming schema.

Thoughts on reorganizing as such using sub categories?

Python Language:

  • Committers (equivalent to python-committers, recategorized from top level)
  • Development (equivalent to python-dev, new)
  • Ideas (equivalent to python-ideas, recategorized from top level)
  • Users (no mailing list equivalent that I’m aware of, recategorized from top level)

For now I’ve created the Development category. I suppose we can always recategorize later.

:frowning:

I remain -1 on splitting python-dev traffic between here and the mailing list, and in particular doing so without a proper community discussion of the change.

And I’m a little annoyed that this seemed to happen just because @vstinner kept asking for it, in spite of a number of people being uncomfortable with the idea. (@EWDurbin sorry if that’s not the reality, but I’m not clear what your actual reason for doing this was).

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ack, agh, sorry I suppose I jumped the gun?

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Okay… category removed until steering council or other suitable body decrees something. Apologies for misinterpreting.

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