[Distutils] a plea for backward-compatibility / smooth transitions

[Donald Stufft]

On Jul 30, 2013, at 5:17 PM, Paul Moore <p.f.moore at gmail.com> wrote:

> On 30 July 2013 21:58, Donald Stufft <donald at stufft.io> wrote:
> As far as how to fix it I don't have a particularly magic answer. I will try to be more
> mindful of my tone and that distutils-sig is likely not my adversary anymore as well
> as try to ask questions instead of arguing the relevance immediately.
> 
> Thank you - both for the thoughtful response and the explanation of what is going on in your thinking.
> 
> I certainly tend to think about possible issues rather than benefits, maybe more than I should as I don't personally have any particular problems with a rapid pace of change (except in some specific areas where I'm in so much of a minority that I don't expect my concerns to be a big driver in the grand scheme of things). I think I'm doing this to make sure people haven't missed potential issues I'm aware of, but I can easily imagine that this comes across as negative "stop energy". I'll try to stick to issues where I have genuine concerns, and not theoretical ones in future.

I don't actually mind even theoretical problems nor do I want people to feel like they need to coddle me because of my history with distutils-sig. That history and how It affects me is *my* problem. I think as long as we, including myself, approach theoretical problems as "Let's figure out if this theoretical problem is actually a problem, and if it is do we care about it" and not "here's a bunch of possible problems, we can't do this" then there will be no issues.

It's true that theoretical problems can make me feel more like someones applying stop energy than concrete problems, but that's not a problem of the person bringing up that problem and more just it triggering old feelings from a time where I couldn't even get a SSL certificate trusted by most major browsers by default deployed ;). Not allowing those feelings to poison current efforts is on me.

> 
> And yes, it does feel like distutils-sig of 2013 is a much nicer place than it used to be. Thanks to everyone for working to keep that the case.
> 
> Paul


-----------------
Donald Stufft
PGP: 0x6E3CBCE93372DCFA // 7C6B 7C5D 5E2B 6356 A926 F04F 6E3C BCE9 3372 DCFA

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