On Wed, 26 Dec 2012 02:36:08 -0500, Terry Reedy <tjreedy@udel.edu> wrote:
This is a continuation of my answer to Christian
On 12/25/2012 5:56 PM, Łukasz Langa wrote:
- Communicate what happened clearly and openly to our community.
I am not sure how broadly you mean 'our community', but please no. Nothing need or should be said beyond this list. (Unless Anatoly says something elsewhere -- but let him be the first.
Spam accounts and messages on the tracker are routinely cancelled without notice. The one time I know of that a contributor was banned (suspended, actually, soon followed by an offer of re-instatement without admin privileges), it was pretty much handled privately (though I would have preferred notice on this list first).
And this "private action" had unintended negative consequences. I think anyone who wants to take action on Anatoly should go back and read the threads surrounding Breamorboy's tracker suspension and what happened afterward. I believe the conclusion was that in the future any such actions should be discussed publicly (at a minimum on this list, so we are covering that) before action was taken, but despite having been a principal in that mess I don't remember for sure.
- Communicate to Anatoly the decision to cut him off.
I think any cut-off should be in stages: tracker, pydev, python-ideas. Anything beyond the tracker should be approved by Guido.
I agree that incident specific actions are better than a broad ban.
If Guido wants to take responsibility for any of it, that's fine, but I don't think we should put that burden on him automatically. My understanding is that he signed up to be language dictator, not community dictator.
As far as the tracker goes, I think it should be clearly communicated to him and everyone in plain English (and specified in the user guide if not already) that a) the purpose of the tracker is to help committers receive reports, communicate with reporters and others, and to manage issues, and b) after an initial report, the administrative fields are mostly intended for the use of tracker administrators, including committers. The only reason a submitter can edit the status field is so that they can close an issue to withdraw it (possible after review). If we can enforce that in the database (only admins (or possibly only committers) but not the submitter can reopen), I think we should! That would eliminate bogus reopenings by anyone, not just Anatoly.
The tracker fields used to be more restrictive, and we have been gradually loosening them over time. With the exception of Anatoly, this has been a successful experiment, and I am reluctant to reverse that trend. I would hate to see one bad actor result in restrictions on everyone.
I say this because he specifically justified his re-open action on the basis that *he* also uses the tracker to track issues. So he does not quite understand what it is for. As I said in my previous post, if he reopens a third time, act. He has not yet that I have seen. I also notice that he just 'voted' to reopen http://bugs.python.org/issue7083 but did not do so himself (possible because he cannot).
Going a bit further, I actually would not let a non-admin submitter edit any field as long as an issue is closed. I see this as a sensible refinement of the database policy based on years of experience and not directly specifically at Anatoly. Another tweak based on experience would be that only committers can set version to security issues. I routinely unset 2.6 and 3.1 with a short explanation. Better that the ignorant cannot even make that mistake (I know, submit to the metatracker.)
I have often told submitters in issues that I have closed that if they come back with more evidence or a patch they should reopen the issue. So again I would prefer not to restrict functionality because of one bad actor.
preparing also for vengeful action (which given the history is unfortunately likely).
Shaming anyone publicly is more likely to get such action, and would almost make it justified in my view.
Anatoly has been shaming us publicly for years. We would be much more polite and rational in any more-public statement made (I trust). We would still draw fire. That may or may not make us stronger in the long run...for it to do so we will, in fact, need to have a principled position to rest upon, and thus I think we would be well recommended to have something PEP-like in terms of a policy statement.
I wonder if a public discussion aimed at developing such a policy would clue Anatoly in (probably not). I wonder what other communities have done. I know Python is one of the leaders in the COC matter, so perhaps we will have to be a leader here as well.
This is not easy stuff.
- Prepare for rectifying unjust PR by the banned person, etc.
Better to not unnecessarily provoke it, and worry about it when it actually happens.
No, it is a good idea to be prepared. In fact, if the board is not already aware of this issue, they probably should be made aware. As Chris pointed out, we are already talking "in public" (as it should be, IMO).
I'm seriously considering writing all this as a PEP (most likely without any personal details). I hope this won't be useful in the future but it might help having this gathered as written policy, if only for transparency reasons.
This strike me as over-reaction.
I'm not at all sure that it is, but that "most likely" had better be replaced by "most certainly". Such a policy needs to rest on fundamental principles. "Bad cases make bad law", so one must be careful not to craft a policy to deal only with a specific egregious thing, but rather craft something that will serve well in the general cases. Specifically, any such policy, and any statement made if we take action on Anatoly, will have to address the inevitable calls that we are engaging in censorship. There are principled answers to that charge, but we must decide which of them we are following and why, and articulate that clearly and consistently.
As an aside, it has occurred to me that the fundamental problem here is that we do not feel that Anatoly respects *us*. So it is no wonder that we are offended and do not respect him.
--David