On Wed, 11 Dec 2019 at 06:52, M.-A. Lemburg <mal@egenix.com> wrote:

The conversion to an inactive dev is something that core devs need to be asked to agree to, and thus needs to be managed as a status flag, not depend on commits to the repo.

All committers were asked to check the voter list in mid-November, before the ballot period started: https://mail.python.org/archives/list/python-committers@python.org/thread/EX...

The relevant section in PEP 13 is this one:

====================== There's no time limit on core team membership. However, in order to provide the general public with a reasonable idea of how many people maintain Python, core team members who have stopped contributing are encouraged to declare themselves as "inactive". Those who haven't made any non-trivial contribution in two years may be asked to move themselves to this category, and moved there if they don't respond. To record and honor their contributions, inactive team members will continue to be listed alongside active core team members; and, if they later resume contributing, they can switch back to active status at will. While someone is in inactive status, though, they lose their active privileges like voting or nominating for the steering council, and commit access.

So everyone *was* asked if they wanted to be kept as active for this election, but it wasn't explicitly emphasised to the folks that were otherwise going to being marked as inactive that this was happening (as it had to be inferred from the absence of your name, rather than being called out as a list of voters that had been flagged as potentially inactive since the last voter roll was generated).

Cheers, Nick.

-- Nick Coghlan | ncoghlan@gmail.com | Brisbane, Australia