On Fri, Feb 10, 2017 at 8:51 PM, Brett Cannon <brett@python.org> wrote:
In the end I decided NOT to do the history mutation/rewrite basically because I didn't discuss this with python-committers ahead of time (so it's entirely my fault this didn't go forward). The history of this repo -- along with the code -- is collectively owned by all of the people who have contributed to it. The idea of mutating the history like this was not discussed with the stakeholders/contributors of that history ahead of time and thus I don't feel it is my place to unilaterally muck with it without having a proper discussion ahead of time (I unfortunately didn't have this thought until this morning). While I realize I have been given the rights to change our workflow, none of these changes are permanent (as our regular changes to it show :) . But changing the history is permanent and thus a much heftier thing to do with the dictatorial powers I have for this migration.
Had I thought to reach out ahead of time then it's possible I could have gotten the permission necessary. But since leaving this as-is doesn't hurt anything (thanks to GH doing the linking eagerly and thus not picking up any of the issue numbers that pre-exist), I felt it was better to err on the side of caution and not upset people by springing this on them.
Obviously a huge thanks to Senthil and Ezio for giving this a go. The regex will be useful for anyone who wants to write a browser plug-in to add the automatic linking so I don't view the work as wasted.
+1, I've already started to write an extension and I'm converting the regex to JS flavor now so thanks again Senthil and Ezio! --Berker