On Wed, Jul 15, 2015 at 6:38 AM Barry Warsaw <barry@python.org> wrote:

On Jul 15, 2015, at 12:29 PM, Nick Coghlan wrote:

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The FreeBSD community recently posted their Code of Conduct guidelines for technical discussions at https://www.freebsd.org/internal/code-of-conduct.html

I wouldn't mind something shorter, perhaps a happy middle ground between that and the PSF CoC? In any case, +1 though...

...

Would folks mind if I drafted a CPython Code of Conduct inspired by their example, and proposed it for inclusion in the Developer's Guide?

Why not put it in a low-numbered informational PEP?

+1 on the idea and on making it a PEP that the devguide can reference since it will essentially be a procedural doc.

Three things. One, I won't hold this view against you, Steven, nor should anyone else. You expressed an opinion politely and it wasn't somehow prejudiced against a group of people. You should never worry about expressing an unpopular opinion as long as it's done with respect and not flat-out evil like being racist or something. The whole point of CoCs is to make it so people feel welcome to express themselves.

Two, the PSF CoC is not retroactively applied to all things. For instance, this list does not fall under the CoC (notice no mention in the footer nor at https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-committers). So deciding to apply the PSF CoC to all things related to the development of Python would require something like a PEP.

And three, we need a CoC. Not to explicitly call anyone out, but in the past week or so I have heard peoples' ideas called "ridiculous" and been told to "shut up" on various mailing lists. I have met people at PyCon numerous times who have viewed at least python-dev as at minimum cold and possibly hostile to people, and that's simply not the kind of environment I would like to foster. I honestly think all of us -- including me -- have been way too tolerant of core devs having bad attitudes and not calling them out on it, especially when they simply got too passionate and lost their composure (the magic of email is we can think before we send so tolerating outbursts of any regularity really shouldn't happen). Part of this tolerance for bad attitudes has been cultural, but having a CoC would help to start changing that by making people feel comfortable in standing up and stating they thought someone had been rude.

Anyway, that's why I support having a CoC that applies to everything involving Python's development.

-Brett from a tablet

On Wed, Jul 15, 2015, 21:21 Steven D'Aprano <steve@pearwood.info> wrote:

On Wed, Jul 15, 2015 at 12:29:52PM +1000, Nick Coghlan wrote: [...]

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I think their guidelines align pretty well with the way we try to run the CPython issue tracker and the core mailing lists, but we don't currently spell out those expectations for newcomers (or potential newcomers) as clearly as they have.

Would folks mind if I drafted a CPython Code of Conduct inspired by their example, and proposed it for inclusion in the Developer's Guide?

Is there an actual social problem you are trying to solve here, or have you just run out of things to do? :-)

The PFS has had a CoC for over a year now. I haven't seen any reduction in "bad behaviour" (it was so low that it would be hard to go any lower), but in my opinion it seems that people are even less inclined to express unpopular viewpoints and more inclined to stay silent. I don't know if that is due to the CoC. I haven't seen anyone directly threated by it for voicing an unpopular opinion, but I know that its at the back of my mind whenever I think about posting. If people don't like what I have to say, can they use the CoC to threaten me? That makes me self-censor all the time, and I don't mean "Am I being a dick?". I mean "How unpopular will this opinion be?"

I spent a *long* time thinking about whether or not I should send this and go against the multitude of +1s, and I'm not sure that people aren't going to hold it against me. (What sort of monster must I be to be against a CoC and in favour of trolls and abuse?) I know of other forums, not Python related, where what I am saying certainly would be held against me for being "disruptive".

To me, a CoC has a definite chilling effect when it comes to voicing opinions that go against the majority. It's hard enough to swim against the tide of popular opinion even in the absense of formal rules that can be used against you. If there was a genuine problem with trolls and abuse on the tracker, then I would consider stronger measures than what we already have in place (i.e. social disapproval, and the ability to close people's account on the tracker). You don't need a CoC to say to somebody "There's no call for that, you went to far, you crossed a line."

-- Steve

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Le 16/07/2015 07:34, Brett Cannon a écrit :

I have met people at PyCon numerous times who have viewed at least python-dev as at minimum cold and possibly hostile to people, and that's simply not the kind of environment I would like to foster.

For the record, the last time someone said something like that, it was on the PSF-members ML. When it was questioned by several people, I think nobody gave any example or fact to back that opinion.

Regards

Antoine.

On Thu, Jul 16, 2015 at 10:08 AM, Nick Coghlan <ncoghlan@gmail.com> wrote:

That last one is actually an area where I *dis*agree with the FreeBSD guidelines - I see asking for someone to revert a change as a big deal, as it means we're laying claim to a non-trivial amount of their time. A non-urgent request for clarification is a different story, but I also see us occasionally repeating a pattern where long before the person that actually made a change has a chance to respond to a thread, there'll be half a dozen or more people jumping in saying "Yeah, I want an answer too!".

I have seen a couple of these too. Sometimes it is a pile on, but other times it is a very reasonable question to python-dev that goes completely unanswered. Those cases (which are admittedly few) are unfortunate b/c if one person has a question about a commit, then others probably to do. When the question goes unanswered, then we miss out on learning something.

For example, I remember a case from a few months ago where someone (don't remember who off the top of my head) made a micro-optimization and there were post-commit questions about it. As far as I can tell, the question went unanswered and I sincerely was curious what the rationale for the change was. I felt like there was something we all could have learned from the potential discussion around the question that was asked.

Given the global nature of the lists, I think we should be giving folks *at least* 24 hours to reply to a question before assuming they're not going to respond, and given that only some of us get to count reading and replying to python-dev threads as work time, a few days leeway would be better (perhaps even a week to account for folks that are busy with other things during the week and mostly contribute on weekends). Those of us that *do* get paid for this also need to try to remember to account for that asymmetry in available time for participation.

To me this depends on why the change is being questioned. If there is a question about why a change was made or a minor bug was found in post-commit review*, then I agree it can wait a few days. On the other hand, if someone commits a change that turns all the build-bots red and doesn't respond for several hours, then I would think that is fair game to revert.

So, I do think reverting changes is a very reasonable course of action at times. It should just be used judiciously.

-- Meador

• Ideally these kinds of things would be caught in pre-commit review, but I understand that it is not always practical to expect that everyone gets a chance for pre-commit review for every change or that every bug is caught in pre-commit review.