
On Sat, Nov 03, 2018 at 10:55:14AM +0000, Paul Moore wrote: [...]
Currently, I feel like my only option is to abstain and hope - I don't have the time (or knowledge) to review, understand and assess the proposals well enough to make an informed vote, but I have no way of assessing the "expert opinions" of those who do, to allow me to make a broad judgement. Frankly, I feel pretty disenfranchised by the process at the moment.
I think that there are legitimate criticisms of the way this transition and the discussion has been handled. (Such as the fragmentation of discussion and the difficulty in discovering where the pieces are.)
But let's be fair to those who have put in the effort to make this work so far. "Disenfranchisement" is not even close to a fair criticism.
Nobody has said you can't vote. Nobody is stripping you of your commit bit, or your status as core dev. Nobody is going to tell you that you can't vote because your name is similar to a convicted felon three states away, or force you to stand in line for 16 hours at the one polling booth for twenty miles on election day, and then turn you away because you have the wrong kind of ID. Nobody is passing laws to strip you of your ability to vote because of entirely spurious fears of "voter fraud". (The actual fraud being legimate voters being disenfranchised because they're poor or the wrong colour.)
With respect Paul, if we aren't willing to make even a minimal effort to make an informed vote, that's not disenfranchisement, that's just "can't be bothered".
"Can't be bothered" is a perfectly legitimate choice here -- I'm still considering it for myself. But I don't see how your current position is justified: as I read your post, your complaint is that you don't want to actually vote yourself, you don't have the time or inclination to study the proposals and make an informed choice, but you're disturbed that you don't know whether or not other people are likely to make the choice you would make if you did make an informed choice, which you aren't planning on doing.
"I know nothing about the issues, but I want to be sure everyone else will vote they way I would vote if I did."
I don't see how this is even possible. With respect, I think the answer to that is, well duh, if you don't vote or take part in the discussion, don't be surprised if people don't vote they way you want them to :-)
In any case, as I said, I think there are legitimate criticisms to be made. E.g. I think the decision to move the discussion to Discourse in the middle of the governance crisis was overly optimistic, the timing was not well thought-out, and making that decision behind closed doors and then announcing it as a fait acompli was certainly not living up to the ideals of openess, consideration and community-engagement that we claim to follow:
https://discuss.python.org/t/python-committers-is-dead-long-live-discuss-pyt...
https://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-committers/2018-September/006187.ht...
But what's done is done, and we can't say we weren't informed or asked to open an account on Discourse.
But none of these criticisms are so serious as to bring the whole exercise into doubt. If we want to vote, we can. If we want to make an *informed* vote, we can read the PEPs:
https://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-8000/
and we can start a discussion here or on Discourse.
Or if we want to just trust the rest of the community to do the right thing, that's a legitimate position too.
You've done the right thing asking about the discussion, and I'm sad that nobody has answered your question:
how can I trust that the decision will be one I can be comfortable with - and how do I influence the direction except by participating in the discussions I've been unable to locate?
That's a reasonable question. I wish I had a better answer, but I too have found it exceedingly hard to locate discussions. I know there has been some here, and some on Discourse (which I find hard to navigate, perhaps because of unfamiliarity).
Anywhere else? Zulip? I can't even find that, let alone tell if there are archived discussions.
The PEPs are on Github, has there been discussion there?
https://github.com/python/peps/blob/master/pep-8000.rst
-- Steve