Mailing List Archive

Hi,

Le 10/12/2022 à 13:21, Stephen J. Turnbull a écrit :
>
> as far as
> I can see the Mailman side is handled as well as it can be now that
> Discourse provides threading information, and you just subscribe
> Mailman to Discourse.
There is a small catch though: unless I'm mistaken, Discourse won't let
you subscribe to just a set of categories, so any filtering has to
happen on the Mailman side.

If we wanted an equivalent of python-list, we could just forgo the
filtering and pass on posts from all Discourse categories. But for
python-dev, the volume is too high, and existing python-dev subscribers
probably don't want a category like "Help".

Cheers,
Baptiste
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I'm presuming we're talking about ways to bidirectionally mirror between
mailman and a Discourse forum.

On 10Dec2022 21:21, Stephen J. Turnbull <stephenjturnbull@gmail.com> wrote:
>Since Mailman (and its users!) expects messages to arrive
>asynchronously and handles that using threading information, as far as
>I can see the Mailman side is handled as well as it can be now that
>Discourse provides threading information, and you just subscribe
>Mailman to Discourse.

That would work for receiving Discourse posts into the Mailman mailing
list.

>And obviously we can just sign up Discourse to
>Mailman.

Can we? If you're talking about posts from the mailing list appearing on
Discourse, this isn't trivial.

>The latter direction may be harder, depending on whether
>Discourse can make sense of batches of messages being composed
>independently of its message flow.

It (anecdotally, link lower down) looks like you can make a new Topic
(thread) on Discourse if your user has a sufficient trust level
(discourse users become more trusted over time). But the message author
needs to be a Discourse user. So either all the individual mailman users
need to be Discourse members _or_ the from address needs to be a
list-wide id (eg the list submission address), but then the posts won't
have the right author on the Discourse side.

None of that is easy to fix - mailing lists essentially just forward
messages, with some gatewaying of what messages they allow inbound
depending on the list. By contrast, Discourse posts have authors which
must be Discourse users.

>The fact that Discourse didn't
>provide threading information to email users in the past suggest that
>it has an alternative mechanism for organizing mail flows, and message
>IDs and Reference headers from email may not be so easily integrated.

No, that stuff works ok now.

For new Topics (threads) this post:
https://discourse.gnome.org/t/email-use-of-discourse-how-to-start-a-new-thread/12324/4
sugggests that you can email to a specific category and I presume it
would appear as a new Topic. I suspect any `In-Reply-To` or `References`
would be ignored.

For replies, the email goes to a post-specific address which is used to
stitch the message into an existing Topic discussion thread. The
outgoing `In-Reply-To` and `References` headers are made on the fly when
Discourse sends the post as email to whichever users are set up to
receive an email copy. The source `Message-ID` is preserved.

>I know nothing about Discourse internals, but I suspect that's going
>to be the difficult part if there is one. With a little luck that
>will be no problem. ;-)

I know a little, but not a lot.

In short: copying the Discourse stuff to mailman could be done by
subscribing the mailman list to the Discourse forum. Letting
_nonDiscourse_ users reply or post to Discourse is not trivial.

Cheers,
Cameron Simpson <cs@cskk.id.au>
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Le 10/12/2022 à 22:51, Cameron Simpson a écrit :
>
> In short: copying the Discourse stuff to mailman could be done by
> subscribing the mailman list to the Discourse forum.  Letting
> _nonDiscourse_ users reply or post to Discourse is not trivial.

IMHO it would already be a nice achievement if these two things could be
done:

- subscribe the mailman list to the *relevant parts* of the Discourse
forum; that would be more or less the Core Development and PEP
categories (you must know better than me: is there anything else your
filters let in?)

- let *Discourse users* reply to those list messages from their mail
client with their known-to-Discourse address (is the From address enough
for Discourse to recognize the user?)

Cheers,
Baptiste
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On Sat 10 Dec, 17:47 +0100, Baptiste Carvello <devel2022@baptiste-carvello.net> wrote:
>There is a small catch though: unless I'm mistaken, Discourse won't let
>you subscribe to just a set of categories, so any filtering has to
>happen on the Mailman side.

Well, it is actually possible to achieve what you want.

I have set up Discourse in mailing-list mode [1].

By default muted categories are not included in the emails you get in mailing list mode.

So, you just need to mute all categories you don't care about. It is a bit of work, but it needs to be done only once. To have an almost complete equivalent of the topics that were once discussed on python-dev, you can just mute every thing except the "Core Development" category. This is the setting I am using since a while and I am quite happy with it. You may want to unmute the "PEPs" category as well.

Threading info is kept quite nicely, so I read the discourse mail notifications as if it were a mailing list and I almost do not see any difference. Text is sometimes a bit messy if people heavily use the discourse formatting capabilities, but this kind of posts are quite rare in my experience.

This does not solve the problem of engaging actively in a discussion, of course, but at least for me it is OK to login to discourse if I have to post, given that 99.99% of the time I just want to read posts in my mail client.

Ciao!
Tiziano

[1] You can do this while editing your profile preferences, under the "Emails" menu
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If only, fellow list colleagues, I could see only the topics I choose on
Discourse.

The Discourse feels like python-list, python-dev, python-* combined.
I feel cluttered.

If only I could also export the folks using only the mailing list to the
Discourse.

If only Discourse was as easy to search and port as a mail archive.

If Python is a community thing, the discourse is it. But, I fear, crafting
mail
and reading walls of text might become the skills of a bygone age.

On Discourse i miss the simplicity of a medialess, interactionless,
botless, privilegeless,
notificationless, badgeless platform.

But, we must keep up with advances in tech, cope with different ways, cope
with
what most people use. It's the way forward.

Next time, see you at PythonHut in the Metaverse.

Kind Regards,

Abdur-Rahmaan Janhangeer
about <https://compileralchemy.github.io/> | blog
<https://www.pythonkitchen.com>
github <https://github.com/Abdur-RahmaanJ>
Mauritius

> On 11 Dec 2022, at 21:05, Abdur-Rahmaan Janhangeer <arj.python@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> If only, fellow list colleagues, I could see only the topics I choose on Discourse.

Have you tried changing the Preferences for Notifications/Categories?
That would appear to give you the control you are asking for?

Barry

>
> The Discourse feels like python-list, python-dev, python-* combined.
> I feel cluttered.
>
> If only I could also export the folks using only the mailing list to the Discourse.
>
> If only Discourse was as easy to search and port as a mail archive.
>
> If Python is a community thing, the discourse is it. But, I fear, crafting mail
> and reading walls of text might become the skills of a bygone age.
>
> On Discourse i miss the simplicity of a medialess, interactionless, botless, privilegeless,
> notificationless, badgeless platform.
>
> But, we must keep up with advances in tech, cope with different ways, cope with
> what most people use. It's the way forward.
>
> Next time, see you at PythonHut in the Metaverse.
>
> Kind Regards,
>
> Abdur-Rahmaan Janhangeer
> about <https://compileralchemy.github.io/> | blog <https://www.pythonkitchen.com/>
> github <https://github.com/Abdur-RahmaanJ>
> Mauritius
> _______________________________________________
> Python-Dev mailing list -- python-dev@python.org
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> Code of Conduct: http://python.org/psf/codeofconduct/

On 11Dec2022 19:50, Tiziano Zito <opossumnano@gmail.com> wrote:
>On Sat 10 Dec, 17:47 +0100, Baptiste Carvello <devel2022@baptiste-carvello.net> wrote:
>>There is a small catch though: unless I'm mistaken, Discourse won't let
>>you subscribe to just a set of categories, so any filtering has to
>>happen on the Mailman side.
>
>Well, it is actually possible to achieve what you want.
>
>I have set up Discourse in mailing-list mode [1].
>By default muted categories are not included in the emails you get in
>mailing list mode.
>
>So, you just need to mute all categories you don't care about. It is a bit of work, but it needs to be done only once.

Until a new category is made.

>To have an almost complete equivalent of the topics that were once
>discussed on python-dev, you can just mute every thing except the "Core
>Development" category. This is the setting I am using since a while and
>I am quite happy with it. You may want to unmute the "PEPs" category as
>well.

Otherwise, that sounds like a workable approach.

FYI, a recent post to the Ideas Discourse category has these relevant
headers:

X-Discourse-Post-Id: 77785
X-Discourse-Topic-Id: 19277
List-ID: Discussions on Python.org | Ideas <ideas.discuss.python.org>
List-Archive: https://discuss.python.org/t/expanding-asyncio-support-for-socket-apis/19277

You can filter on List-ID to select a category, which would avoid muting
a lot of categories.

>Threading info is kept quite nicely, so I read the discourse mail notifications as if it were a mailing list and I almost do not see any difference. Text is sometimes a bit messy if people heavily use the discourse formatting capabilities, but this kind of posts are quite rare in my experience.

Discourse formatting is MarkDown, which is at least pretty easy to read.

>This does not solve the problem of engaging actively in a discussion, of course, but at least for me it is OK to login to discourse if I have to post, given that 99.99% of the time I just want to read posts in my mail client.

Yah.

The tricky bit to my mind is that if the flow is just Discourse->Mailman
then people replying on the mailing list do not get seen by the
Discourse users.

Cheers,
Cameron Simpson <cs@cskk.id.au>
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On 12Dec2022 01:05, Abdur-Rahmaan Janhangeer <arj.python@gmail.com> wrote:
>If only, fellow list colleagues, I could see only the topics I choose on
>Discourse.

You can mute catgeories. I don't.

>The Discourse feels like python-list, python-dev, python-* combined.
>I feel cluttered.

Aye. But I filter my inbound email, and can divert things as desired.

>On Discourse i miss the simplicity of a medialess, interactionless,
>botless, privilegeless,
>notificationless, badgeless platform.

I seriously recommend you try the mailing list mode. I use it pretty
happily, and only hop over to the web forum when someone posts a
screenshot (which we actively discourage for code snippets) and
occasional other rare situations.

Cheers,
Cameron Simpson <cs@cskk.id.au>
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Baptiste Carvello writes:

> There is a small catch though: unless I'm mistaken, Discourse won't let
> you subscribe to just a set of categories, so any filtering has to
> happen on the Mailman side.

There are two approaches that come to mind. The first is
list-per-category, which would most efficiently be implemented in the
MTA, but could be implemented in Mailman, either with existing spam-
filtering or with a bit of code in a custom Rule. This would make
sense if categories change slowly and have substantial traffic,
because creating a new list requires admin intervention at a high
level (moderators can't do it, list owners can't do it).

The second would be to use a feature called topics. Changing topics
also requires admin intervention, but list owners can do it. Also, in
the case of creation of a new category, individual users can access it
immediately by using the archives (which don't respect topics IIRC,
never used them myself) or by subscribing to the "no topic" topic
(which normally defaults off, again IIRC -- if not, that can be
changed by the list owner IIRC, if not, a trivial patch).

> If we wanted an equivalent of python-list, we could just forgo the
> filtering and pass on posts from all Discourse categories. But for
> python-dev, the volume is too high, and existing python-dev subscribers
> probably don't want a category like "Help".

That seem accurate to me.
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Cameron Simpson writes:

> I'm presuming we're talking about ways to bidirectionally mirror between
> mailman and a Discourse forum.

Yes.

> None of that is easy to fix - mailing lists essentially just forward
> messages, with some gatewaying of what messages they allow inbound
> depending on the list. By contrast, Discourse posts have authors which
> must be Discourse users.

That's not a problem in principle, because Mailman at python.org
insists on list membership for posts. It could be a minor annoyance
for users because Mailman allows a user to have a variety of email
addresses, so you actually have to check which address you've been
using. Perhaps people with multiple Mailman subscriptions would have
to reconfigure their so they all use the address that Discourse knows,
and their Mailman subscriptions to access mail from that address. I
don't think that's a big deal, but it's there.

> I suspect any `In-Reply-To` or `References` would be ignored.

That could be problematic. Not sure about that.

> For replies, the email goes to a post-specific address which is used to
> stitch the message into an existing Topic discussion thread.

This could work! I guess for "to message" replies it would cut
Mailman out of the loop (the reply would go author -> Discourse ->
Mailman), so it might be a little odd in the user's mail client and in
Mailman archives (assuming they were desired and permitted).

> The outgoing `In-Reply-To` and `References` headers are made on the
> fly when Discourse sends the post as email to whichever users are
> set up to receive an email copy. The source `Message-ID` is
> preserved.

I don't see why that would be a big problem. Threading would be a
little less robust, but would work 99% as well as with full
References.

> Letting _nonDiscourse_ users reply or post to Discourse is not
> trivial.

I don't think that would be desired. It would be nice for users if
existing Mailman User addresses could be grandfathered into Discourse
just to save them ten minutes navigating the Discourse signup, but
it's not obvious to me that's desirable or desired by Discourse
admins. On the other hand, Discourse's members-only policy is
basically the same as Mailman's, so we'd probably lose a boatload of
python-dev lurkers, but nobody can complain about the principle.

Steve

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> This does not solve the problem of engaging actively in a discussion, of
course

I just submitted a proposal to create a Discourse plugin to improve the
accuracy of their inbound email parsing, which is something that several
people have complained about in this thread. This would enable two things:

- Folks who prefer to live in their inbox could continue to do so and
contribute by just replying to emails. Discourse currently has
reply-by-email, but it often mangles formatting and/or entirely deletes
text. Once these issues are fixed, folks who like the current experience
would be able to just pretend the forum doesn't exist and continue having
the same experience as they currently have with GNU Mailman.
- Right now importing the archives from GNU Mailman into Discourse isn't
realistic for the same reasons; some messages will import correctly, but
others will be mangled or missing text. This means you would still need to
maintain the Malman archive as the canonical source of truth. Once fixed,
not only would the [Python-Dev] archives be searchable within Discourse,
but they should also rank better in search than they do in their current
archive.

If this is something you care about (positively or negatively), here is the
exploratory proposal:

https://meta.discourse.org/t/proposed-plugin-to-improve-reply-by-email-accuracy/252944

Any feedback and/or testing would be much appreciated! Right now Discourse
recognizes that this is a problem and is interested in solving it, but
getting it prioritized will require folks to A) speak up saying they want
it done B) test the underlying API to verify that it actually solves the
problem.

Alex

On Sun, Dec 11, 2022 at 1:54 PM Tiziano Zito <opossumnano@gmail.com> wrote:

>
> On Sat 10 Dec, 17:47 +0100, Baptiste Carvello <
> devel2022@baptiste-carvello.net> wrote:
> >There is a small catch though: unless I'm mistaken, Discourse won't let
> >you subscribe to just a set of categories, so any filtering has to
> >happen on the Mailman side.
>
> Well, it is actually possible to achieve what you want.
>
> I have set up Discourse in mailing-list mode [1].
>
> By default muted categories are not included in the emails you get in
> mailing list mode.
>
> So, you just need to mute all categories you don't care about. It is a bit
> of work, but it needs to be done only once. To have an almost complete
> equivalent of the topics that were once discussed on python-dev, you can
> just mute every thing except the "Core Development" category. This is the
> setting I am using since a while and I am quite happy with it. You may want
> to unmute the "PEPs" category as well.
>
> Threading info is kept quite nicely, so I read the discourse mail
> notifications as if it were a mailing list and I almost do not see any
> difference. Text is sometimes a bit messy if people heavily use the
> discourse formatting capabilities, but this kind of posts are quite rare in
> my experience.
>
> This does not solve the problem of engaging actively in a discussion, of
> course, but at least for me it is OK to login to discourse if I have to
> post, given that 99.99% of the time I just want to read posts in my mail
> client.
>
> Ciao!
> Tiziano
>
> [1] You can do this while editing your profile preferences, under the
> "Emails" menu
> _______________________________________________
> Python-Dev mailing list -- python-dev@python.org
> To unsubscribe send an email to python-dev-leave@python.org
> https://mail.python.org/mailman3/lists/python-dev.python.org/
> Message archived at
> https://mail.python.org/archives/list/python-dev@python.org/message/7ZJWPADSL7BGBZ5Y6BRHP2LDTHQFZ7UV/
> Code of Conduct: http://python.org/psf/codeofconduct/
>


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