[Distutils] The Python Packaging Ecosystem (of Nick) Support for other programming languages

[Matthew Brett]

Hi,

On Sat, Apr 8, 2017 at 6:55 AM, Nick Coghlan <ncoghlan at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 7 April 2017 at 15:26, Thomas Güttler <guettliml at thomas-guettler.de> wrote:
>> Why is having blue sky ideas rude? AFAIK the word "rude" means "offensively impolite or bad-mannered."
>
> Ideas are easy to come by - we have no shortage of them.

Bad ideas are surely easy to come by, but, at least in my experience,
it often takes a bit of discussion to work out which ones these are.

> Hearing from folks that say "I'm working on a project to improve X,
> can you give me some advice?" is generally wonderful, but "Someone
> (else) should totally build this thing that I wish existed" is
> typically just noise, and
> "I have never personally done anything for any of you, but I want you
> all to imagine you work for me and have to work on the things I care
> about" is extraordinarily self-entitled behaviour.

Wishing to avoid this criticism I humbly submit the pip / manylinux /
macOS packaging work I do for the scientific Python stack.

That done, as you imply, no-one can force us volunteers to do any
particular piece of work, so, although self-entitlement may be
unattractive, it's not particularly threatening.  Of course,
sometimes, people who aren't doing anything at present, suggest ideas
that are useful, and with the right encouragement, actually do start
to help.  I've certainly seen that happen with my other developer hats
on.

Cheers,

Matthew