Lack of or Rude Communication

[dstufft]

A user has expressed concern that the folks working are either not communicating well (Rude) or are just not communicating at all (lack of responses to threads, issues, etc). How can we foster a welcoming space and ensure nobody feels ignored?

[qwcode]

Part of the problem, is that when you get down to it, there's really only about 5 people doing steady work (PEPS and/or coding) in packaging right now (in the "mainstream" projects that is). 5 people can't respond to all the issues that come up.

[ncoghlan]

The other part is the generally poor documentation, and the fact that the current state of a lot of things isn't defensible in an absolute sense. The history of "Hey, here's how we're going to fix it!" -> "Oops, that didn't work :(" in the packaging space also makes us wary of overpromising and underdelivering (again).

[Ivoz]

I think a major problem is that there has never been a clear, central, canonical open line of communication for packaging issues to the wider python community.

So after people learn how to deal with x broken issue or z feature in their daily lives (and assume that will work forever more), and a year down the track we start trying to fix it, or break something in the process of trying to fix things, or improve security such that y no longer works, the first experience they have with us is that we've broken something of theirs - they never get a chance to start off with a positive experience of being informed about what's happening, or even submit input about anything they don't agree with or want to ask questions about.

A smoking gun ATM is setuptools briefly dropping Features to many people's surprise and chagrin.

TL;DR a lot of people start off communication with us from a negative experience, so it's already hard to turn that around. This would be a lot smaller problem if we could look for ways to change that defacto situation.

e.g, this is the right idea, we simply need far more of that that can reach more people.

[daenney]

As someone who's only recently hit the Python packaging space:

• The docs. I think we've been over this plenty of times.
• There is no clear entry-point for communication. I got pointed to the Python SIG mailing lists when I submitted an issue on Github that was a question because I couldn't find another way in. Most docs wrt setuptools, distribute or pip-installer don't mention this SIG either. Also, not everyone knows what SIG means, I actually had to look it up, only then did it make sense to me.
• IRC is a nice, low bar entry into a discussion. It's also nice to be able to lurk in a channel and just see what's going on. For quite a few of us 'youngsters' mailing lists are a fairly archaic way of communication, a more real-time approach is often preferred.
• Python.org > Community > IRC was the only place I was able to find a reference to #distutils
• Mailing list archives are fairly terrible at being searched and browsed. It would be nice if some of the comment threads that keep coming up are extracted into some kind of site/FAQ thing.
• Python.org's SIG page is pretty empty: http://www.python.org/community/sigs/, are there no active SIGs anymore and if not, why isn't there one for packaging?
• Apparently there's a distutils SIG but the only place I could find out it existed was by searching https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo.
• The name distutils is being used everywhere but just about no-one knows that's what it's called. When I search for information about things like this I'll likely try the terms python packaging, setuptools and/or distribute, not distutils.

[ncoghlan]

packaging.python.org is designed to be the new hub for information. The
Python 3.4 docs will redirect users to that in preference to reading the
low level technical details in the stdlib docs (pending some work to
actually make those docs changes).

We're aware of the mailing list discoverability issue, and I expect
python.org will eventually be upgraded to Mailman3 and the HyperKitty web
gateway.

[dstufft]

I tried to argue that we should close down distutils-sig and rename it packaging but people yelled at me for it :(

I think packaging.python.org is good, but I don't think it makes much sense as a changelog or announcement service.

[qwcode]

"packaging-release" list? for release related emails for any of the pypa projects?

[ncoghlan]

I expect we can get access to python-announce for packaging related
announcements, especially now Python 3.4 bundles pip.

[dstufft]

That could probably be reasonable. I'm thinking in terms of PyPI too, there's not really a great way for us to say "Hey in X time/releases Y is going to break/change" and ge that message out to the wider population.

[daenney]

We're aware of the mailing list discoverability issue, and I expect python.org will eventually be upgraded to Mailman3 and the HyperKitty web gateway.

What about in the mean, now, time?

[merwok]

I suspect the configuration set up to serve the devguide could be reused to have docs.python.org/packaging.

[ncoghlan]

On 8 Mar 2014 03:58, "Daniele Sluijters" notifications@github.com wrote:

We're aware of the mailing list discoverability issue, and I expect
python.org will eventually be upgraded to Mailman3 and the HyperKitty web
gateway.

What about in the mean, now, time?

It's not currently a priority for the infrastructure team, as Mailman3 is
not yet released.

Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHub.

[daenney]

Oh, another one, there's @pypa on Github and on BitBucket, both seem to be in use and have a different set of repositories.

[dstufft]

yes those are both us owned by PyPA, some projects are using git and some are using hg,

[hickford]

My experience: GitHub (and Bitbucket) are great. Search engines find relevant discussions, or you can browse the repo to see everything. Everyone's comments are on one page, and it's obvious how to add your own (there's a giant green 'comment' button). It's dead easy to make an account--most community people already have one--but if not, it's a familiar process. Thus, GitHub is welcoming, and levelling too.

Mailing lists, on the other hand, are dire, and I believe excluding to almost all of the community. From a search engine, you'll be taken to a single post from the middle of the discussion. You might see excerpts from earlier posts in reverse chronological order. It's disorientating. To read all the comments, you have to click around a tree structure (shown on a different page). That is ludicrously unfriendly. Most people surely give up. Perhaps the experience is better if you are a member of the mailing list, and receive the messages in your inbox. Understand though, that new people will always read mailing list posts on the web.

Worse, there are no instructions on the page how to comment. For example https://mail.python.org/pipermail/distutils-sig/2013-August/022529.html , there's no big green comment button. If you click around, you can sign up to receive future posts in your inbox (not sure I want that) but that still doesn't explain how to reply to the post you're reading. I suspect older community are oblivious to this problem, because they grew up on mailing lists. Understand, most young people don't know how to use a mailing list--they've never seen one. By modern standards, the process to do so is laughably slow. (I'm reading a post on the web. I should be able to write a comment from the same page). It's prohibitive for many.

PEPs are thus problematic. For example http://legacy.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0453/ . There are no community comments on the page itself. There are links to five different mailing list pages where you can read what other people have said in the past, but there are no instructions how to have your own say. That's a shame. (Compare with Ruby feature requests which are discussed on an ordinary comment thread on the same page https://bugs.ruby-lang.org/issues/8992 )

bugs.python.org is also unwelcoming, in my experience. I reported a bug once, it was closed immediately, with a reply

You can't comment here, you're in the wrong place. This subject been discussed on the mailing list several times before [no link given]. If you want to comment, you should join the mailing list, go back in time, wait for the right post, and reply there.

The message was polite, but completely unhelpful. I felt unwelcome. I gave up trying to contribute to (what I assumed was) the community and started writing rants on Stack Overflow instead. They proved extremely popular, which encouraged me to try participating again. I'm happy I found your GitHub group--you have interesting things to say, and you've accepted my contributions. Thanks. I've even submitted pull requests--I love how levelling GitHub is.

To clarify, I don't believe the poster on bugs.python.org was trying to exclude me--they probably thought they were being helpful. But the perceived "we do things our way" attitude made me feel ignored and unwelcome. I'm sure other potential contributors have turned back at the same or earlier hurdles. http://bugs.python.org/issue16675