[Python-Dev] Goodbye

[Guido van Rossum]

On Wed, Sep 22, 2010 at 8:29 AM, Stephen J. Turnbull <stephen at xemacs.org> wrote:
> Guido van Rossum writes:
>
>  > I would recommend that in the future more attention is paid to
>  > "documenting" publicly that someone's being booted out was
>  > inevitable, by an exchange of messages on python-dev (or
>  > python-committers if we want to limit distribution).  And no, I
>  > don't think that IRC (where I suspect this happened) is sufficient.
>
> +1 on explaining "what" and "why" where the committers can see it, and
> +1 on limiting distribution.

Agreed on both counts.

> The one time I lifted someone's privileges that's the way I did it (by
> luck, mostly).  In hindsight, the fact that it was all done in plain
> sight of the committers made it easy for us to put the incident behind
> us.  The fact that it was only visible to the committers made it
> easier mend the relationship later.

I understand the desire to keep dirty laundry in. I would like to keep
it in too. Unfortunately the offending person in this case chose not
to; I will not speculate about his motivation. This is not unusual; I
can recall several incidents over the past few years (all completely
different in every detail of course) where someone blew up publicly
and there wasn't much of a chance to keep the incident under wraps. I
see it as the risk of doing business in public -- which to me still
beats the risk of doing business in back rooms many times over.

-- 
--Guido van Rossum (python.org/~guido)