[python-committers] python-committers is dead, long live discuss.python.org

[M.-A. Lemburg]

On 29.09.2018 11:40, Łukasz Langa wrote:
> 
>> On Sep 29, 2018, at 09:53, Nick Coghlan <ncoghlan at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>> Especially on the eve of critical governance discussions that will heavily impact the future of python-dev.
> 
> Ironically it's the very gravity of those upcoming discussions that made us decide to move fast on this.
> 
> Part of why we are in this mess in the first place is due to inadequate moderation controls available on mailing lists and the way they invite thundering herds of answers and the combinatorial explosion of posts in trees of discussion. The PEP 572 process exercised this painfully well.
> 
> Discourse is a chance to address the problems that contributed to the BDFL stepping down.

Hold on. The group of core developers is rather limited in size.
I would understand such a move for e.g. python-ideas, but much less
so for the committers list.

I'm not opposed to trying Discourse, but don't think the timing is
good to fork off discussions to yet another medium. This creates
more noise than necessary and diverts discussions away from what
we should really be concerned about, namely our model of decision
making for PEP discussions which don't come out with a clear
direction and a model of how to steer the overarching direction of
where Python will go in the coming decades.

>> arbitrary decision making
> ...
>> insufficiently representative group
> ...
>> without involving most of the people affected
> ...
> 
> Hold on. Out of the 30-something committers active in the past two releases, 20-something were at the sprint. (I can pull more detailed stats but I'm on the phone now.) Setting up Discourse with the intent of replacing the mailing lists met no opposition at the sprint. By all counts, the group was sufficiently representative and involved most of the people affected.

Ouch. So those 20 core devs got to decide for whoever else considers
themselves a core developer and at the same time fixed the very
definition of who is allowed to vote and who is not without asking
the complete set of core developers ?

The reality is that we're a remote working group, so while in person
meetings are nice and can seed new ideas, we do have to take into
account that people not present at those meetings do have a stake
in Python as core developers as well.

> I would prefer for everybody to be there, of course. Some decided against it, some could not be there even though they wanted to. This is unfortunate. But if you have committer unanimity in mind, that's not something that was feasible regardless of the forum.

I don't think we're discussing unanimity here, but democratic
basics, i.e. who has a stake in Python, who will be heard in
discussions and who has voting rights.

On the
https://discuss.python.org/t/which-list-of-core-developers-is-authoritative/55
posting, you summarize a discussion we've
had here on the ML, but leave out parts such as the emeritus
discussion (which AFAIR concluded in making this based on whether
a core dev wants to switch to that role rather than making this
based on PRs and Github activity), it also makes it look like
we agreed on just giving "active" core devs voting rights in the
governance discussions, which is not the case.

This is a typical situation you run into with forum postings.
The top posting often receives more attention and is seen as
summary of the whole discussion. Unless the top poster updates
the posting to reflect the outcome of the discussion below,
this can easily to misinterpretations.

In email discussions, such summaries are created after the
discussions (eg. as PEP), which avoids such misinterpretations.

To avoid the same on Discourse, we'd need to have a common
understanding to keep the top posting updated to where the
discussion is going.

Regarding the topic of voting rights: Since we have never
really had to vote on anything, the only democratic approach
is to give everyone listed as core developer voting rights.

Limiting this to an arbitrary definition of "active" is not
democratic, since the definition of "active" represents a
way to introduce representations, which we can, of course,
have, but only after having elected those representatives.

-- 
Marc-Andre Lemburg
eGenix.com

Professional Python Services directly from the Experts (#1, Sep 29 2018)
>>> Python Projects, Coaching and Consulting ...  http://www.egenix.com/
>>> Python Database Interfaces ...           http://products.egenix.com/
>>> Plone/Zope Database Interfaces ...           http://zope.egenix.com/
________________________________________________________________________

::: We implement business ideas - efficiently in both time and costs :::

   eGenix.com Software, Skills and Services GmbH  Pastor-Loeh-Str.48
    D-40764 Langenfeld, Germany. CEO Dipl.-Math. Marc-Andre Lemburg
           Registered at Amtsgericht Duesseldorf: HRB 46611
               http://www.egenix.com/company/contact/
                      http://www.malemburg.com/