Syncing mailing list & discourse?

Discourse Feedback
1

Is there a way we can keep python-committers (mailman) and the corresponding channel here in sync? For example, that could be some sort of bot.

That would allow us to transition more smoothly, be less disruptive to the governance discussions, and allow us to cancel the experiment (if it came to that) more easily. It would also keep the list archives up-to-date. That would ease my concerns with the abrupt change and I expect it would help address the strong concerns expressed by others.

-eric

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This defeats the purpose of many things that Discourse offers like closing topics, moving between categories, semantic quoting, post edits, and so on, and so on.

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Syncing wouldn’t invalidate those benefits would it?

-eric

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Sadly it would because the reason we don’t want e-mail anymore is that e-mail either doesn’t support those things or would sidestep them. As long as you can keep responding to e-mail, it doesn’t matter if somebody “closes a thread” here. As long as there are people on e-mail, you can’t fix typos, rename topics, mention people to get their attenion, and so on.

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Not necessarily. In fact I did talk to the Discourse folks a few years ago about building a MM3/Discourse bridge. It sounded doable at the time, but I’m not hacking on Mailman these days. :slight_smile:

That said, it can be much like Gmame/Mailman. Messages “gated” from the mailing list would show up in forum posts, but you’d have all the controls you want for the Discourse view of the world. So if you want to close things off or whatever, you’d have a safer walled garden when you view Discourse, but a more free-ranging discussion when viewing via the mailing list. Then you can pick whatever works for you.

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I think that this would end up having Discourse effectively be a second class citizen and people would be incentivized to stick with the mailing list in order to get “all” of the discussion. It also doesn’t solve the problem really. The mailing list would still be under the CoC and such, so the burn out that folks like Brett are feeling from trying to manage that wouldn’t go away.

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this would end up having Discourse effectively be a second class citizen

Yeah, and that’s backwards. IMO email should become the second class citizen. Email cannot be killed or ignored (as Google Wave found out a decade ago) but it could be the notification option of last resort – that’s certainly how I use it when it comes to most discussions I’m participating in these days (e.g. GitHub issues, comments in Dropbox Paper docs, Slack). GitHub, at least, shows decent integration (you can respond to issues via email and they show up as you would expect) but it makes no dice about what’s the primary medium.

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8

Sure, but for python-committers it’s a different story.

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for python-committers it’s a different story

Can you clarify what you meant there? Are you just asserting that the email list should remain the primary channel for discussions? Why?

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It’s smaller and more tightly controlled. You generally aren’t going to get the millithreads with more heat than light.

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What Barry said. I’m not suggesting python-committers should stay an email list. It just isn’t one that will benefit the most from moving over to discourse.

-eric

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12

Got it. But its one where we can set up an experiment easily.

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