On Thu, Nov 8, 2012 at 10:21 AM, John Benediktsson <mrjbq7@gmail.com> wrote:
Out of curiousity, I googled Anatoly and python-ideas and this thread[1] seems a useful example. His suggestions seem intended to help, he provided some code examples, and made only a handful of posts in support of his idea (receiving a few negative responses).
The problem isn't that he's always wrong, the problem is that the signal to noise ratio is awful and attempting to filter the good ideas from the bad wastes a whole lot of time for a whole lot of people. For more typical illustrations of our past interactions with him, look up his attempts to get us to migrate from mailing lists to Google Wave (what a great idea that would have been), his comments on MoinMoin as a wiki technology, his comments on the Roundup installation, and his comments on the PyPI packaging ecosystem.
The entire problem is summed up in the first two paragraphs of this post: http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-ideas/2012-June/015304.html (my quoted comment and Anatoly's reply). His proudly declared attitude of "I can't be assed doing any research into what's already happening in this area or why things are the way they are, and I won't listen when anyone tries to inform me of those things, so I'm going to make everyone waste their time reading my uninformed BS opinions" does not a net-positive community member make. Yes, that was one of the threads that finally made me pull the trigger on routing his emails to /dev/null
It stands in stark contrast to the approach of someone like Daniel Holth, who saw some similar problems with PyPI, researched the current state of the art within the community, and then went ahead and created something (the wheel archive format) that's going to go a long way towards addressing many of them.
There comes a time when even an inclusive community has to ask itself "Is trying to include *this particular* person alienating current or potential community members that refuse to spend their time in an environment that tolerates these kinds of antics?".
Regards, Nick.
-- Nick Coghlan | ncoghlan@gmail.com | Brisbane, Australia