Porting mailing list underused?

[Mark Lawrence]

Given the adverse publicity recently over the problems with porting from
2 to 3, I find it strange that the subject list has only 351 messages
that I can see dating from 15/12/2008 to 05/01/2014. This is despite it
being clearly mentioned here http://www.python.org/community/lists/
Anyone in the know who can explain this phenomenon?

--
My fellow Pythonistas, ask not what our language can do for you, ask
what you can do for our language.

Mark Lawrence

[Skip Montanaro]

> Anyone in the
> know who can explain this phenomenon?

I don't think I can explain it authoritatively, but I can hazard a
guess. Skimming the archives sorted by author, it looks like most/all
the correspondents are Python core developers. That leads me to
believe this was a list created for the core Python developers to
discuss issues related to porting tools such as 2to3 or six. I doubt
it was intended for Python programmers to get help porting their own
code. From the Python core development perspective, I think automated
porting tools are likely pretty mature at this point and don't warrant
a lot of discussion.

Skip

[Mark Lawrence]

If the dumbo OP had remembered to say that
https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-porting states rather
vaguely "This list is to contain discussion of porting Python code
between versions, mainly from Python 2.x to 3.x." it might have helped
garner more answers. Still, if we leave the list open for long enough
we'll all be able to discuss porting python 2.x to python 4.x :)

[Mark Lawrence]

On 10/01/2014 21:31, Mark Lawrence wrote:
> On 10/01/2014 20:38, Skip Montanaro wrote:
>>> Anyone in the
>>> know who can explain this phenomenon?
>>
>> I don't think I can explain it authoritatively, but I can hazard a
>> guess. Skimming the archives sorted by author, it looks like most/all
>> the correspondents are Python core developers. That leads me to
>> believe this was a list created for the core Python developers to
>> discuss issues related to porting tools such as 2to3 or six. I doubt
>> it was intended for Python programmers to get help porting their own
>> code. From the Python core development perspective, I think automated
>> porting tools are likely pretty mature at this point and don't warrant
>> a lot of discussion.
>>
>> Skip
>>
>
> If the dumbo OP had remembered to say that
> https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-porting states rather
> vaguely "This list is to contain discussion of porting Python code
> between versions, mainly from Python 2.x to 3.x." it might have helped
> garner more answers. Still, if we leave the list open for long enough
> we'll all be able to discuss porting python 2.x to python 4.x :)
>

I've now found this
https://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2008-December/083951.html

QUOTE
It is a public mailing list open to everyone. We expect active
participation of many people porting their libraries/programs, and hope
that the list can be a help to all wanting to go this (not always smooth
:-) way.
ENDQUOTE

Strikes me that if more people had participated, or maybe even known
about it, we currently wouldn't be on the edge of WWIII regarding PEP 460.

[Ethan Furman]

On 01/11/2014 01:51 PM, Mark Lawrence wrote:
>
> I've now found this https://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2008-December/083951.html
>
> QUOTE
> It is a public mailing list open to everyone. We expect active participation of many people porting their
> libraries/programs, and hope that the list can be a help to all wanting to go this (not always smooth :-) way.
> ENDQUOTE

Thanks for finding this mailing list. I have subscribed to it. :)

--
~Ethan~