
Steve Holden writes:
Yes, in the last year in particular there has been some excellent effort of maintaining the issue tracker content. But the question still remains - who are we worried about offending?
In this thread, we did worry about offending Sean and dangerjim. Now that Sean has commented, I don't think anybody is worrying about offending anybody; there is an understanding that there's a process issue to be resolved. The question is how best to build the community. There are two camps, the quantity camp ("low cost of contribution means more contributors, and that's good"), and the quality camp ("more interaction within the community, especially of experienced developers with newcomers, means more effective contributors and that's good").
I didn't realize we had so much effort available that we can ignore such offers.
Steve, calm down; nobody contributing to the thread is ignoring the offer, and the status quo terms seem to be acceptable to both Sean and dangerjim. They correctly asked for more privilege so that the proposed work can be done more efficiently. Equally correctly, there is a discussion of whether an exception to past practice should be made here, and whether it's worth changing that past practice. I find RDM's argument quite compelling, that the current policy does impose some costs on the newcomer and the mentor, but that on the other hand it does strongly encourage interactions which both build community in the sense of interpersonal relationships and improve the mentoring process for the actual work being done. He concludes that the small costs involved (including the possibility of discouraging some potential contributors) are more than compensated for by the quality of the product. Where do you disagree with that logic?
To make it clear: this is not intended as a criticism of you personally, rather of those who do not seem to feel that increasing the developer community is important. Perhaps diversity is just something you write in a statement.
*By definition*, a community is not diverse in the most fundamental sense. As long as Pythonicity is important to Python, there is danger as well as opportunity in more rapid influx of newcomers.