[python-committers] Anatoly Techtonik's contribution

[Nick Coghlan]

On Wed, Dec 26, 2012 at 7:07 PM, Georg Brandl <g.brandl at gmx.net> wrote:
> FWIW, I agree 100% with Terry here.  I'm certainly annoyed by many of Anatoly's
> contributions, and find myself extremely unwilling to do anything about his
> perceived issues, but to exclude a community member publicly (!) from all (!)
> python.org resources is going too far IMO.  Individual policy violations can and
> should of course be sanctioned.

The problem is the effect he has on other people. He's an energy
drain: I see the "tektonik" on yet another python-ideas thread or
tracker issue and just go "Ah, fuck it, I'm gonna go play a computer
game intead" (or else I reply, and *then* go play a game). Even his
pointless threads get replies because his vortex of cluelessness draws
other people in and it becomes necessary to head off the stupidity
before it becomes a huge sink for wasted effort.

Energy drains that confine their efforts to python-list don't affect
me personally, because I don't follow python-list at all (although I
appreciate the efforts of those that *do* follow it and pass along any
valid issues that are raised). Anatoly has independently found himself
routed to /dev/null by multiple core developers (starting way back
with the "you should all switch to using Google Wave because I prefer
it" idiocy). He still has no clue what the tracker is for, what
python-dev is for, what it means for an idea to be "pythonic", what is
even remotely technically feasible for CPython, and unlike most people
in that situation, he doesn't even have the courtesy to find his own
piece of the internet to play in, instead spraying crap over CPython
core development resources, forcing people to waste their time
cleaning up after him.

We've tried fucking hard to educate Anatoly, and help him become a
productive contributor. It hasn't worked, and he continues to be a net
productivity loss, whining about things that are just plain hard to
fix (or are an inherent part of the language design), and making
actual contributing volunteers feel bad about themselves and their
work.

We don't want to be mean to somebody who genuinely appears to be
trying to help, but eventually we have to look at his net impact and
say "keeping our productive volunteers happy is more important than
trying to include someone who has demonstrated over an extended period
of time that they lack the ability to collaborate effectively". At the
very least, that means revoking tracker and python-dev posting
privileges. I'd vote for cutting him off from python-ideas, too.

Regards,
Nick.

-- 
Nick Coghlan   |   ncoghlan at gmail.com   |   Brisbane, Australia