Those responses make a lot of sense. One thing that stands out is that there’s a tension between a) the desire to have a forum of contributors and b) the need for broad feedback about the decisions the contributors are making.
I first got involved in this forum to provide some feedback on a feature that I very much wanted to see adopted–and it seemed like broad feedback[1] was important in that conversation.
Since then I’ve seen many threads that contain something like “we should find out what the folks working on foo think about this idea”. The foo folks are not able to contribute to python directly–they’re too busy with foo–but their input is valuable as a group of users, so they participate. Iterate on that process a bit and you end up with a lot of forum members who love to talk about Python but can’t volunteer their time to work on developing it.
Sadly I think moving to Discourse, by making these discussion far more open and accessible, has exacerbated the effect that can be frustrating for core devs.
from many other people, not just me ↩︎