[python-committers] Anatoly Techtonik's contribution

[Chris Jerdonek]

On Wed, Dec 26, 2012 at 5:28 AM, R. David Murray <rdmurray at bitdance.com> wrote:
>>
>> On 12/25/2012 5:56 PM, Łukasz Langa wrote:
>> > I'm seriously considering writing all this as a PEP (most likely
>> > without any personal details). I hope this won't be useful in the
>> > future but it might help having this gathered as written policy, if
>> > only for transparency reasons.
>>
>> This strike me as over-reaction.
>
> I'm not at all sure that it is, but that "most likely" had better be
> replaced by "most certainly".  Such a policy needs to rest on fundamental
> principles.  "Bad cases make bad law", so one must be careful not to
> craft a policy to deal only with a specific egregious thing, but rather
> craft something that will serve well in the general cases.  Specifically,
> any such policy, and any statement made if we take action on Anatoly, will
> have to address the inevitable calls that we are engaging in censorship.
> There are principled answers to that charge, but we must decide which
> of them we are following and why, and articulate that clearly and
> consistently.

+1.  It might seem bureaucratic to some, but I think grounding actions
in due process and documented policy is important.  The Diversity
Statement is a good example of this.  (That statement has a different
purpose though.  It's more about something we want rather than how to
handle something we don't want.):

http://www.python.org/community/diversity/

What is CoC by the way?

> As an aside, it has occurred to me that the fundamental problem here is
> that we do not feel that Anatoly respects *us*.  So it is no wonder that
> we are offended and do not respect him.

FWIW, I've found him to be more what I'd call spammy/annoying and
lacking in some areas rather than disrespectful (opening many issues
with vague descriptions, starting more than his share of threads on
python-ideas, etc).  So I've never felt offended.  Granted, I'm
relatively new to being involved and don't follow him closely.  I
quickly learned to pass over most of what he writes for lack of time.
It's a source of amazement to me that what he writes sometimes leads
to something productive.

--Chris