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2 changes: 1 addition & 1 deletion .codespellrc
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[codespell]
ignore-words-list = Ege, Ned
ignore-words-list = co-ordinate, Ege, Ned
230 changes: 230 additions & 0 deletions docs/monthly-meeting/2025-06.md
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# Documentation Community Team Meeting (May 6, 2025)

## Roll call

(Name / `@GitHubUsername` _[/ Discord, if different]_)

- Adam Turner / `@AA-Turner`
- Bartosz / `@bswck`
- Blaise Pabon / `@blaisep` / `controlpl4n3`
- Carol Willing / `@willingc`
- Ee / `@EWDurbin` / `@ee.durbin`
- Jeff Jacobson / `@jwjacobson`
- Joe Kaufeld / `@itsthejoker`
- Kattni
- Keith / `@KeithTheEE`
- Lufti Zuchri
- Ned Batchelder / `@nedbat`
- Panagiotis Skias
- Petr Viktorin / `@encukou`
- Trey Hunner / `@treyhunner`

## Introductions

> If there are any new people, we should do a round of introductions.

Several new attendees were present, a round of introductions were made.

## Discussion

### Translation

[Carol]:

> There's been lots of activity over the past 2 months about translations. It's great
> that we have strong interest in translation. 🎉
>
> Building on the helpful work of Julien Palard and others on
> [PEP 545](https://peps.python.org/pep-0545/) eight years ago and stewarding
> translations since then, we discussed briefly at the CPython Language Summit to
> revisit any process modifications that may be beneficial moving forward. One of the
> key process changes that the core team found beneficial (some languages are already
> doing) was to expand the coordinator role from an individual to more than one
> individual when there is interest.
>
> Here's a [baseline doc](https://hackmd.io/@willingcn/Synk3LXWgl) to bootstrap
> discussion at the meeting.

Multiple coordinators for each translation are preferred. PEP 545 specifies one. Anybody
who's blocked on translation should get the right tools and get the ability to do the
translations. Carol's recommendation: put amending PEP 545 on hold & let the process
settle down. If anyone would like to co-ordinate, file an issue and possibly let people
know on Discourse or Discord.

Is anyone blocked for translations? -- no one speaks up

Questions about the document & plans? -- no one speaks up

[Adam]: On the process point: if new translators should open issues, are we seeking the
Editorial Board (EB) members to approve, and how do we have appropriate permissions
assigned?

[Carol]: My thinking is that the process should be reflected in the devguide. In pep
545, in about three months from now, we'll amend whatever we need to, but the process
itself tends to be better captured in the devguide instructions. Things like 'who would
the repo belong to' and such. Right now, I can open a PR that is a recap of the meeting,
for coordinators, if you're interested, let people know in the devguide and let the EB
know by making a PR and making a post on Discourse under the Documentation topic that
it's what you're interested in doing. From there, I think you guys are going to have to
help me understand exactly what people need. Normally we message Ee or someone similar
to help people get the right permissions. Does that address it?

[Adam]: I think the only issue we really had was with the Bengali translation, but I
think we're basically good to go otherwise.

[Jeff]: spoke with Irvan Putra interested in Indonesian translation, has a
[pull request (python/devguide#1567)](https://github.com/python/devguide/pull/1567) open
and raised a question about removing a coordinator. Is it necessary to define a
procedure for someone to stop being a coordinator?

[Carol]: I think that if someone doesn't want to be a coordinator anymore, they should
make a PR removing themselves from the group of coordinators and let everyone know that
it's something they're no longer interested in. The goal of a coordinator is to create
documentation in a target language, not to give you specific authority. If there are
conflicts, as there sometimes are, we'll work through them, and we'll continue on. If
anyone has any specific things that they'd like to see in the Dev Guide, @ mention me
[Carol] and we'll take a look.

[Petr]: Over the years, since seeing [PEP 1](https://peps.python.org/pep-0001/), I've
learned the rules for submitting a successful PEP, but we are lacking a formal document
on exactly how to submit and a PEP approved by the EB.

[Adam]: It might be useful to add an explicit "what's this document meant to achieve"
section to the PEP. Carol said: we want translations to happen, we don't want process to
happen. Rules are important because they guide, but we need to keep in mind their
rigidity.

### Backporting large changes to 3.13

[Petr]: This is a bit like pushing directly to production. Should we change the policy,
so we keep large non-fix docs changes in pre-release branches? I wonder if it would be
prudent to limit how we release these large blocks, as there's not enough time to debug
if there are issues.

[Carol]: Are we only talking about large document fixes, or only backporting one or two
releases?

[Petr]: Yes. If you restructure the text, add some new sections, or something similar.

[Carol]: Is it related to page structure, content, or both?

[Petr]: Content as well.

[Adam]: To take the contrary opinion, I think the view I've always taken for docs
changes is if it is, say, rewording a note or rewording something to make it more
readable, as long as everything in that change still exists in the backport versions, an
improvement is an improvement. The analytics show that a lot more people use /3 and the
default version of the docs than specifically picking a version. If we've made a quality
of life improvement, we should be trying to put that in front of people as quickly as
reasonably possible. In general, better to get things out faster as long as they improve
the experience. Delaying backporting structural changes may make it harder to edit
later.

[Ned]: I agree with Adam that there's not much harm in backporting docs changes. Even
though Petr compared it to pushing directly to prod, I think it's not quite the same
because we shouldn't compare code and docs. We want to make sure that we don't impact
the drift between differences too much.

[Petr]: If you fix a typo or reword a sentence, all of the translations are immediately
null and void. They will then revert to English, and that's something that we need to
keep in mind as well.

[Carol]: Yes, yes. I think we should put in the devguide that if there's a large docs
PR, please take into consideration prior to backporting what the translation impact
might be and on the backported versions. Overall, I think you seem to be in agreement.
The last thing we want to do is mess up the translations, so I think that continuing to
discuss is a good idea. I will leave it in your capable hands, Petr.

### Other topics

- [Ee]: Want to discuss future of docsbuild infrastructure!

We're moving more and more PSF infra to Kubernetes. We'll need the doc build server to
move as well, and it looks like it'll be more work than a simple Django app. What amount
of pain is there around the docs builds?

The existing docs build scripts do provide an interesting interface. As long as the
scripts are doing what the maintainers want, parallelizing them should be an easy task.
In some future, a push could trigger build tasks that build docs which are pushed to
object storage. [...]

What's the need? What can we do in the short term? What's the long term plan?

[Blaise] I'm familiar with the build process for Read the Docs, but this is different?

[Ee]: Yes, the system runs on cron and ad-hoc jobs. The scripts are in
[python/docsbuild-scripts](https://github.com/python/docsbuild-scripts)

[Adam]: Performance has significantly improved. We do less now: we used to build HTML,
E-pub, Latex[A4], Latex[letter], texinfo etc across versions and translations. Now we
run 3 streams: all translations (round trip every 24 hours), non-HTML English (2× a
day), HTML English (every ~30min). Would be very receptive to moving to a push-based
approach. Currently it's just about fast enough that docs are done when CI is finished.
People who have access: release managers, Adam, Julien. Fairly small number of people
who would need to change their workflows. I have no experience with Kubernetes, but
would absolutely love to go to a multicore [scalable?] system.

[Ee]: Familiar enough with docs builds from supporting it for years. Ultimately, the
output is a directory of files. We should be able to treat that as an interface. You
tell a service what to invoke, and [...] what to serve. We'd need to find someone to
help build out the infrastructure -- react to pushes, start the scripts, collect output.

[Adam]: There are some manual tasks -- a version going end-of-life, adding switchers to
old versions.

[Petr]: Read the Docs? How far along are we in that migration?

[Adam]: I did go through and get a list of issues re: how our model differs from RtD
expectations, I might have another go at figuring out how to reconcile the approaches.

[Carol]: We need to involve the relevant people - Manuel, Adam, Petr, release managers,
etc.

### A tutorial aimed at beginners to _programming_ and Python?

[Joe] Wrote a lot of docs like that in bootcamps and various education. People new to
programming have various expectations. Do we want to start with how programmers think?
How to define a variable? 2+2=4?

[Carol]: I have some thoughts, but I'd like to hear from more people who have done this
before.

[Trey]: Get people into it, then explain things as you get to them.

[Kattni]: From my experience, the big problem was that it was written for people who are
already programmers. The tutorial needs to be constructed in a manner that people want
to do it. If it's not catchy to a beginner, people won't want to do it. That needs to
speak to where we start and how we move through the tutorial. My experience is not
making it through the tutorial; I added a note that it's not for programmer beginners.
We have a lot of beginner tutorials on the net, but I went to the official one. I think
we need to provide something on python.org.

[Keith]: The outreach WG is interested [...] When I've tried to teach friends
programming, they didn't want to learn programming, they wanted to solve a problem.
Thinking about small projects that have a quick loop from a skeleton to a complete
project. Those can all funnel to the existing tutorial. To answer "who is the audience":
you have "bubbles" of interests that all funnel to a standardized tutorial that Kattni
was envisioning.

[Carol]: I'll talk about it as pathways to Python rather than a beginner tutorial. When
I was helping people fabricate ideas (including with code), I saw people who could code
but did not see themselves as coding. I told them how they can do something interesting
in five lines of Python or less. When I try to do something I approach it through music.
There's no one size fits all, it's how you apply your skills. The current tutorial
serves people who are already developers. There's a need to democratize pathways to
computational thinking. The core team probably isn't the right team to drive this.

[Ned]: I like hearing all the ideas about how this could be approach. Not sure how to
form a group that could move in one direction.

[Trey]: I like the radical approach, but I'm afraid that it might end up as a "very big
thing" that would hold us back. Maybe the tutorial should be "the second-best tutorial"
for everyone.

[Bartos]: The general point is that Python has a lot of different use cases and
audiences. Everyone has different backgrounds and interests. I'd like a tutorial to be
at the intersection at all these paths. Maybe we shouldn't answer all questions for all
the paths. I like Raymond's talk about chunking and aliasing.

[Adam]: Think about adding a list of tutorials to the index. Make it easier to jump
around. Think about Diátaxis. We should cover `match`, not necessarily data science.
1 change: 1 addition & 0 deletions docs/monthly-meeting/index.rst
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Expand Up @@ -22,3 +22,4 @@ Monthly reports in chronological order.
Mar 2025 <2025-03.md>
Apr 2025 <2025-04.md>
May 2025 <2025-05.md>
Jun 2025 <2025-06.md>
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