On Thu, Jul 1, 2021 at 10:49 AM Victor Stinner <vstinner@python.org> wrote:

What happens usually is that some modules have no maintainer. Once you
merge a single change in a module, boom! You are now the new
maintainer for your entire life time! More and more people will ask
you to look at their "very important" bug blocking their production
and their very specific use case. You will get more and more reviews
request: "since you merged a single change 12 months ago, I'm sure
that you will love to review my precioooous bugfix! Come on, it's
trivial!". Now you realize that you don't know the design of the
module. You don't know its history. You know nothing, and the entire
world now have very high expectation, since you merged an obvious and
trivial change.

“The ancient Oracle said that I was the wisest of all the Greeks. It is because I alone, of all the Greeks, know that I know nothing.”

~ Socrates

The same could largely be applied to maintaining open source (especially a codebase as large as CPython). The truth is that at a fundamental level, we're all (any software developer) just making educated guesses as to whether or not patches are suitable for merging, or whether or not a bug fix will actually work. Tests make us a little more certain, but it is still a guess. So the problem is really just the unrealistic expectation that there exists people who are able to make a decision with absolute 100% certainty that no regressions or future unexpected issues will occur as a result of the change.

Also, for fun, here's a pythonized version of the quote:

“[Guido] said that I was the wisest of all the [pythonistas]. It is because I alone, of all the [pythonistas], know that I know nothing.”

With loving-kindness,

--Kyle R. Stanley, Python Core Developer (what is a core dev?)

Pronouns: they/them (why is my pronoun here?)