On 25.03.2019 16:20, Steve Dower wrote:
On 25Mar2019 0217, M.-A. Lemburg wrote:
I must say, I'm a bit surprised by the discussion around the voting process and the candidates.
First, we've been complaining about lack of core devs for a long time. Now we have two great candidates with proven track record of contributing to Python and people complain again. As a small group, we need to attract more capable people and such push back is not a very productive way of doing so.
To be clear, my pushback (on Discourse, since I can only send email from an actual laptop these days but can participate over there from my phone) has been against vague nominations, not the individuals themselves.
I'm *very* concerned about the perception of commit rights being "awarded" rather than being a added responsibility specific to CPython.
I'm not sure where you got that perception from. The two candidates both want to actively contribute to Python.
It's possible that the nominations did not emphasize this enough, but that's an issue with the nomination text, not with the person being nominated.
Yet, the public perception of the discussion is that the persons are not qualified enough and that's definitely not going to have a productive effect on getting more people helping.
Nominees should be willing to take on extra responsibility, and nominators should be making clear that the nominee is at least somewhat proven to be ready for it. Nominations for being a good contributor to other projects makes no sense, and nominations without a specific role or focus area are also vague enough that I don't see it leading to longer standing commitment.
I don't necessarily want to formalize a specific set of rules or things that people have to do in order to become a core developer. But I do want to avoid creating a culture of "this person is nice and built a nice library let's give them commit rights". The PSF already recognizes people for these contributions, which is the right way to do it.
If the core committers (via the SC) also want to offer a vote of thanks to a community member, then sure, we can do that. But keep it separate from "we trust you to modify the language/runtime/core tools without oversight".
If people feel they need more guidance, they should ask the ones who nominated the candidates - in public or in private. Because the candidates themselves cannot comment (at least not on this list; don't know about discourse), such discussions have to be moderated by the nominating parties with care.
Isn't this what's been happening? It certainly has been on Discourse.
Not really. I'm not talking about some moderator having to step in to take action. I'm talking about the nominators actively supporting the discussion by fixing mistakes in the nomination, proxying and adding more information (since the candidates cannot speak for themselves) and helping to clarify misconceptions.
Asking people who have voted -1 or +1 to publicly tell the world why they did so is not helpful in this respect, since it just creates bias. What people, who are unsure how to vote, really need, is more information, not bias.
FWIW, it'd be great if there was a way to add someone to a single thread so they _could_ post there - Stefan in particular has had to email a few of us off-list to respond to our queries (though in doing so has proven his commitment, at least as far as I'm concerned, so overall it probably worked out better :) ).
Indeed, it would be helpful to at least allow the candidate to post to discourse (technically, it wouldn't be hard to give them temporary access to this ML either). Having people discuss about yourself and not being able to participate puts the candidates into a very odd and vulnerable position, esp. when the discussion is public.
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