On Wed, Dec 26, 2012 at 5:07 PM, Łukasz Langa <lukasz@langa.pl> wrote:
Dnia 26 gru 2012 o godz. 15:09 Ezio Melotti <ezio.melotti@gmail.com> napisał(a):

> The community should ignore the tone of the messages or even the messages themselves and most importantly avoid replies that convey the same negative feelings.  People should be able to recognize when a discussion is not constructive anymore and leave it, rather than wasting time just to prove a point or to repeat themselves.


The problem I see with that suggestion is that in reality we have to work with what we have, not with what we think we should have.

I don't want to spell out names but I've had more than one discussion at conferences this year with people _afraid_ to get involved with core development on the base of having to deal with behaviour like this. In one case the comment was simply "I don't have time to deal with [people] like him."

This is somewhat surprising to me.  Why would they have to deal with him?  If the "people like him" were the core developers I could understand the problem, but he is just one of the many contributors. 
 
The other case was sadder though: "Looks like you core devs have trouble dealing with criticism, as shown by Anatoly."


I'm not sure I understand this.  ISTM that the problem here is with core devs, that are unable to deal with criticism (and have to resort to bans ;) rather than with him.
 
We strive to be a welcoming bunch and I'm convinced that a part of this is to call out anti-social behaviour and stop it. Otherwise our playground stops looking like a fun and safe place to contribute.


And a side effect of being welcoming is that you get every kind of people.  Different people have different behaviors and skills.  I don't think his lack of social skills is worse than e.g. the lack of English skills of some of the contributors.  In both cases the intentions are not bad, but the message might be difficult to understand and thus can be misunderstood.  These people shouldn't be marginalized just because of their lack of skills.
As an example, I recently found out that one contributor on the tracker that sounded somewhat annoying actually was a ~10 years old kid.  From that point of view his contributions went from somewhat annoying to quite impressive (and I think some of his patches have been committed too).
Of course if people have an intentionally destructive behavior they can be stopped.
 
This is not elitism nor censorship but a simple manner of respecting each other. Think: out of respect for Guido's (or other senior devs') time

I heard this argument several time, but I'm not sure it's a really strong one.  No one is forced to spend his time in any specific way.  Granted, as a contributor you end up spending some of your time for this kind of things as well, but that also includes skimming through mails/comments that you don't care about, tell people that they wrote to wrong ML, that the issue they reported is invalid and so on.
If people spend time reading his messages and responding to him, I assume they have reasons to do it.  If this turns out to be ineffective they should stop.
 
we should put an end to this. Judging from the YouTube view count, humanity has spent over 3000 years watching Gangnam Style. How much time did humanity spend on this thread and all other non-constructive threads/issues fired by Anatoly?


This is not necessarily non-constructive.  We have identified a problem and we are discussing about the possible ways it can be solved, while learning how to deal with similar problem should they occur again in the future.

Best Regards,
Ezio Melotti

P.S. I haven't seen Gangnam Style yet -- I'm too busy tweaking rst markup in the docs :)
 
--e.g.
Best regards,
Łukasz Langa