[python-committers] Anatoly Techtonik's contribution

[Nick Coghlan]

On Thu, Nov 8, 2012 at 12:08 AM, R. David Murray <rdmurray at bitdance.com> wrote:
> On Wed, 07 Nov 2012 14:26:15 +0100, <lukasz at langa.pl> wrote:
>> All in all, is anyone of the opinion that losing him as a community
>> member is worse than keeping him around?
>
> If losing him was the only consequence this would be pretty much a
> no-brainer.  However, it is likely the consequences of a general ban
> would be more widespread than that (negative publicity, etc).

Right, it isn't banning Anatoly in particular that's likely to be
controversial, it's making it completely clear that "yes, if you
successfully piss off all the people that hold the keys to the
python.org infrastructure, you can and will be banned from
participating in any of the communication forums provided by that
infrastructure, specifically the mailing lists, the issue tracker and
the wiki (and the source code repo, if you previously had commit
privileges)".

The mail archives will show that Brett's not the only one that has
tried to channel Anatoly's energy more productively (and the creation
of python-ideas did keep him from bothering python-dev too much for
quite a long time), but every time we think there are signs of
progress, some other new issue comes up and the pattern is always
basically the same:
- "X sucks"
- "Yes, it's a hard problem, and not very exciting, so volunteers
aren't inclined to work on it"
- "but X sucks, so we should do Y"
- "but Y is hugely inconvenient for everyone, so it will never happen.
Besides, even if it did happen, it won't help fix X"
- "we should totally do Y, you're all idiots for not seeing that"
- ...

Although substitute alternate explanations at step 2 like "it's a rare
problem" or "it's not a problem for the core team to deal with", or
"it's not a significant problem for anyone else" or "yes, efforts are
in process to deal with that, but its a long slow effort to build
community consensus" etc, etc.

Regards,
Nick.

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