Re: [python-committers] Anatoly Techtonik's contribution
This is a continuation of my answer to Christian On 12/25/2012 5:56 PM, Łukasz Langa wrote: Dnia 25 gru 2012 o godz. 13:37 Nick Coghlan ncogh...@gmail.com napisał(a): I'm well and truly to the point of caring far more about the feelings of people who get frustrated trying to deal with his obtuseness (whether that arises deliberately or through genuine cluelessness) than I care about his feelings. He has the entire internet to play on, we don't have to allow him access to python.org controlled resources. +1 I opened this thread so I feel somewhat responsible to carry this out to finish. Give me a day or two to contemplate on how to achieve the following: Please do wait. Contemplation and sleep can work wonders. 1. Communicate what happened clearly and openly to our community. I am not sure how broadly you mean 'our community', but please no. Nothing need or should be said beyond this list. (Unless Anatoly says something elsewhere -- but let him be the first. Spam accounts and messages on the tracker are routinely cancelled without notice. The one time I know of that a contributor was banned (suspended, actually, soon followed by an offer of re-instatement without admin privileges), it was pretty much handled privately (though I would have preferred notice on this list first). 2. Communicate to Anatoly the decision to cut him off. I think any cut-off should be in stages: tracker, pydev, python-ideas. Anything beyond the tracker should be approved by Guido. As far as the tracker goes, I think it should be clearly communicated to him and everyone in plain English (and specified in the user guide if not already) that a) the purpose of the tracker is to help committers receive reports, communicate with reporters and others, and to manage issues, and b) after an initial report, the administrative fields are mostly intended for the use of tracker administrators, including committers. The only reason a submitter can edit the status field is so that they can close an issue to withdraw it (possible after review). If we can enforce that in the database (only admins (or possibly only committers) but not the submitter can reopen), I think we should! That would eliminate bogus reopenings by anyone, not just Anatoly. I say this because he specifically justified his re-open action on the basis that *he* also uses the tracker to track issues. So he does not quite understand what it is for. As I said in my previous post, if he reopens a third time, act. He has not yet that I have seen. I also notice that he just 'voted' to reopen http://bugs.python.org/issue7083 but did not do so himself (possible because he cannot). Going a bit further, I actually would not let a non-admin submitter edit any field as long as an issue is closed. I see this as a sensible refinement of the database policy based on years of experience and not directly specifically at Anatoly. Another tweak based on experience would be that only committers can set version to security issues. I routinely unset 2.6 and 3.1 with a short explanation. Better that the ignorant cannot even make that mistake (I know, submit to the metatracker.) 3. Arrange for feasible technological ways to execute the ban on python.org resources, See the suggestion above for the tracker. I presume that the mailing list software can reject specific users and the the gmane is or can be set up to honor rejections. But if that have ever been done, it has been done so privately that I am not aware of it. I would ban from pydev before I would ban from python-ideas. The latter is intended to be a bit more open to off-the-wall posts. I do not see that Anatoly has really abused python-ideas. His post today has 16 responses from other people and only 1 from him. People could have just ignored him after 1 response. Another technological fix: enforce no cross-posting to peps editors list and anything else by rejecting cross-posted messages, both at the editors list and all other python.org lists. My theme with all these suggestions is that making mis-behavior impossible, when possible, is preferable to scolding and banning. Pushes to the repository by unauthorized people are just rejected. If anyone were to complain publicly about such rejection, they would just be laughed at. preparing also for vengeful action (which given the history is unfortunately likely). Shaming anyone publicly is more likely to get such action, and would almost make it justified in my view. 4. Prepare for rectifying unjust PR by the banned person, etc. Better to not unnecessarily provoke it, and worry about it when it actually happens. For months, Jim Fauth (sp?) has repeatedly trashed 3.3 on python-list to the point of telling people not to use it, and implicitly slandered us developers, because he hates the new Unicode implementation (it is 'unfair' because some people benefit more than others). I find Jim more annoying than
Re: [python-committers] Anatoly Techtonik's contribution
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. cheers, Georg On 12/26/2012 08:36 AM, Terry Reedy wrote: This is a continuation of my answer to Christian On 12/25/2012 5:56 PM, Łukasz Langa wrote: Dnia 25 gru 2012 o godz. 13:37 Nick Coghlan ncogh...@gmail.com napisał(a): I'm well and truly to the point of caring far more about the feelings of people who get frustrated trying to deal with his obtuseness (whether that arises deliberately or through genuine cluelessness) than I care about his feelings. He has the entire internet to play on, we don't have to allow him access to python.org controlled resources. +1 I opened this thread so I feel somewhat responsible to carry this out to finish. Give me a day or two to contemplate on how to achieve the following: Please do wait. Contemplation and sleep can work wonders. 1. Communicate what happened clearly and openly to our community. I am not sure how broadly you mean 'our community', but please no. Nothing need or should be said beyond this list. (Unless Anatoly says something elsewhere -- but let him be the first. Spam accounts and messages on the tracker are routinely cancelled without notice. The one time I know of that a contributor was banned (suspended, actually, soon followed by an offer of re-instatement without admin privileges), it was pretty much handled privately (though I would have preferred notice on this list first). 2. Communicate to Anatoly the decision to cut him off. I think any cut-off should be in stages: tracker, pydev, python-ideas. Anything beyond the tracker should be approved by Guido. As far as the tracker goes, I think it should be clearly communicated to him and everyone in plain English (and specified in the user guide if not already) that a) the purpose of the tracker is to help committers receive reports, communicate with reporters and others, and to manage issues, and b) after an initial report, the administrative fields are mostly intended for the use of tracker administrators, including committers. The only reason a submitter can edit the status field is so that they can close an issue to withdraw it (possible after review). If we can enforce that in the database (only admins (or possibly only committers) but not the submitter can reopen), I think we should! That would eliminate bogus reopenings by anyone, not just Anatoly. I say this because he specifically justified his re-open action on the basis that *he* also uses the tracker to track issues. So he does not quite understand what it is for. As I said in my previous post, if he reopens a third time, act. He has not yet that I have seen. I also notice that he just 'voted' to reopen http://bugs.python.org/issue7083 but did not do so himself (possible because he cannot). Going a bit further, I actually would not let a non-admin submitter edit any field as long as an issue is closed. I see this as a sensible refinement of the database policy based on years of experience and not directly specifically at Anatoly. Another tweak based on experience would be that only committers can set version to security issues. I routinely unset 2.6 and 3.1 with a short explanation. Better that the ignorant cannot even make that mistake (I know, submit to the metatracker.) 3. Arrange for feasible technological ways to execute the ban on python.org resources, See the suggestion above for the tracker. I presume that the mailing list software can reject specific users and the the gmane is or can be set up to honor rejections. But if that have ever been done, it has been done so privately that I am not aware of it. I would ban from pydev before I would ban from python-ideas. The latter is intended to be a bit more open to off-the-wall posts. I do not see that Anatoly has really abused python-ideas. His post today has 16 responses from other people and only 1 from him. People could have just ignored him after 1 response. Another technological fix: enforce no cross-posting to peps editors list and anything else by rejecting cross-posted messages, both at the editors list and all other python.org lists. My theme with all these suggestions is that making mis-behavior impossible, when possible, is preferable to scolding and banning. Pushes to the repository by unauthorized people are just rejected. If anyone were to complain publicly about such rejection, they would just be laughed at. preparing also for vengeful action (which given the history is unfortunately likely). Shaming anyone publicly is more likely to get such action, and would almost make it
Re: [python-committers] Anatoly Techtonik's contribution
On Tue, Dec 25, 2012 at 11:36 PM, Terry Reedy tjre...@udel.edu wrote: This is a continuation of my answer to Christian On 12/25/2012 5:56 PM, Łukasz Langa wrote: Dnia 25 gru 2012 o godz. 13:37 Nick Coghlan ncogh...@gmail.com napisał(a): I'm well and truly to the point of caring far more about the feelings of people who get frustrated trying to deal with his obtuseness (whether that arises deliberately or through genuine cluelessness) than I care about his feelings. He has the entire internet to play on, we don't have to allow him access to python.org controlled resources. +1 I opened this thread so I feel somewhat responsible to carry this out to finish. Give me a day or two to contemplate on how to achieve the following: Please do wait. Contemplation and sleep can work wonders. 1. Communicate what happened clearly and openly to our community. I am not sure how broadly you mean 'our community', but please no. Nothing need or should be said beyond this list. (Unless Anatoly says something elsewhere -- but let him be the first. At the risk of stating something that I imagine everyone already knows, this list is itself publicly viewable: http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-committers So in some sense what we write here is already being said beyond this list (though not actively). For example, the thread we're engaging in right now is the second result when Googling python anatoly. I guess my point is that what's going on is already pretty open to the outside (from a read-only perspective). --Chris ___ python-committers mailing list python-committers@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-committers
Re: [python-committers] Anatoly Techtonik's contribution
On Wed, Dec 26, 2012 at 7:07 PM, Georg Brandl g.bra...@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 | ncogh...@gmail.com | Brisbane, Australia ___ python-committers mailing list python-committers@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-committers
Re: [python-committers] Commit privs for Serhiy Storchaka?
I've asked Serhiy about commit access today by email. He want to be committer. He agree with getting review for any nontrivial patch before commit and will follow our rules (as he does it today). What is next step in getting privs? On Wed, Dec 26, 2012 at 2:11 AM, Andrew Svetlov andrew.svet...@gmail.com wrote: On Wed, Dec 26, 2012 at 1:10 AM, Terry Reedy tjre...@udel.edu wrote: You two have been extremely productive, and you end up with more than half the credit. Are you willing to continue? Sure, will do! -- Thanks, Andrew Svetlov -- Thanks, Andrew Svetlov ___ python-committers mailing list python-committers@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-committers
Re: [python-committers] Anatoly Techtonik's contribution
On Wed, 26 Dec 2012 02:36:08 -0500, Terry Reedy tjre...@udel.edu wrote: This is a continuation of my answer to Christian On 12/25/2012 5:56 PM, Åukasz Langa wrote: 1. Communicate what happened clearly and openly to our community. I am not sure how broadly you mean 'our community', but please no. Nothing need or should be said beyond this list. (Unless Anatoly says something elsewhere -- but let him be the first. Spam accounts and messages on the tracker are routinely cancelled without notice. The one time I know of that a contributor was banned (suspended, actually, soon followed by an offer of re-instatement without admin privileges), it was pretty much handled privately (though I would have preferred notice on this list first). And this private action had unintended negative consequences. I think anyone who wants to take action on Anatoly should go back and read the threads surrounding Breamorboy's tracker suspension and what happened afterward. I believe the conclusion was that in the future any such actions should be discussed publicly (at a minimum on this list, so we are covering that) before action was taken, but despite having been a principal in that mess I don't remember for sure. 2. Communicate to Anatoly the decision to cut him off. I think any cut-off should be in stages: tracker, pydev, python-ideas. Anything beyond the tracker should be approved by Guido. I agree that incident specific actions are better than a broad ban. If Guido wants to take responsibility for any of it, that's fine, but I don't think we should put that burden on him automatically. My understanding is that he signed up to be language dictator, not community dictator. As far as the tracker goes, I think it should be clearly communicated to him and everyone in plain English (and specified in the user guide if not already) that a) the purpose of the tracker is to help committers receive reports, communicate with reporters and others, and to manage issues, and b) after an initial report, the administrative fields are mostly intended for the use of tracker administrators, including committers. The only reason a submitter can edit the status field is so that they can close an issue to withdraw it (possible after review). If we can enforce that in the database (only admins (or possibly only committers) but not the submitter can reopen), I think we should! That would eliminate bogus reopenings by anyone, not just Anatoly. The tracker fields used to be more restrictive, and we have been gradually loosening them over time. With the exception of Anatoly, this has been a successful experiment, and I am reluctant to reverse that trend. I would hate to see one bad actor result in restrictions on everyone. I say this because he specifically justified his re-open action on the basis that *he* also uses the tracker to track issues. So he does not quite understand what it is for. As I said in my previous post, if he reopens a third time, act. He has not yet that I have seen. I also notice that he just 'voted' to reopen http://bugs.python.org/issue7083 but did not do so himself (possible because he cannot). Going a bit further, I actually would not let a non-admin submitter edit any field as long as an issue is closed. I see this as a sensible refinement of the database policy based on years of experience and not directly specifically at Anatoly. Another tweak based on experience would be that only committers can set version to security issues. I routinely unset 2.6 and 3.1 with a short explanation. Better that the ignorant cannot even make that mistake (I know, submit to the metatracker.) I have often told submitters in issues that I have closed that if they come back with more evidence or a patch they should reopen the issue. So again I would prefer not to restrict functionality because of one bad actor. preparing also for vengeful action (which given the history is unfortunately likely). Shaming anyone publicly is more likely to get such action, and would almost make it justified in my view. Anatoly has been shaming us publicly for years. We would be much more polite and rational in any more-public statement made (I trust). We would still draw fire. That may or may not make us stronger in the long run...for it to do so we will, in fact, need to have a principled position to rest upon, and thus I think we would be well recommended to have something PEP-like in terms of a policy statement. I wonder if a public discussion aimed at developing such a policy would clue Anatoly in (probably not). I wonder what other communities have done. I know Python is one of the leaders in the COC matter, so perhaps we will have to be a leader here as well. This is not easy stuff. 4. Prepare for rectifying unjust PR by the banned person, etc. Better to not unnecessarily provoke it, and worry about it when it actually happens. No, it is a
Re: [python-committers] Commit privs for Serhiy Storchaka?
On Wed, Dec 26, 2012 at 10:59 PM, Andrew Svetlov andrew.svet...@gmail.com wrote: I've asked Serhiy about commit access today by email. He want to be committer. He agree with getting review for any nontrivial patch before commit and will follow our rules (as he does it today). What is next step in getting privs? Run through the sections here: http://docs.python.org/devguide/coredev.html#gaining-commit-privileges The main one is for Serhiy to send an email with his public SSH key to hgaccou...@python.org (I believe the folks on that list are also tracker admins) and set himself up with a read/write clone. Cheers, Nick. -- Nick Coghlan | ncogh...@gmail.com | Brisbane, Australia ___ python-committers mailing list python-committers@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-committers
Re: [python-committers] Anatoly Techtonik's contribution
On Wed, Dec 26, 2012 at 7:28 AM, R. David Murray rdmur...@bitdance.com wrote: Anatoly has been shaming us publicly for years. We would be much more polite and rational in any more-public statement made (I trust). We would still draw fire. That may or may not make us stronger in the long run...for it to do so we will, in fact, need to have a principled position to rest upon, and thus I think we would be well recommended to have something PEP-like in terms of a policy statement. I wonder if a public discussion aimed at developing such a policy would clue Anatoly in (probably not). I wonder what other communities have done. I know Python is one of the leaders in the COC matter, so perhaps we will have to be a leader here as well. This is not easy stuff. Any such CoC or policy should probably apply to all python.org mailing lists, and bolting one after things like -dev/ideas/list have been around for so long is going to be a hard task to get right. I do think something along the lines of a CoC is a good thing here, but I think it's much larger than python-dev and probably shouldn't be implemented as the result of or as a reaction to one person. I think it'd probably be a PSF-level thing to apply to python.org properties (a few discussions have kicked off, but nothing's more than an inch off the ground). I also think the process of creating a CoC that we don't immediately get burned at the stake for could take a long time to create and implement. I don't think we should have to put up with Anatoly while that process gets kicked around. ___ python-committers mailing list python-committers@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-committers
Re: [python-committers] Anatoly Techtonik's contribution
Hi, On Wed, Dec 26, 2012 at 11:07 AM, Georg Brandl g.bra...@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. I also agree with Terry and Georg. I don't think anyone should be banned from the tracker or from the MLs unless their actions are intentionally destructive (e.g. flooders/spammers). This is not the case for anatoly, so in my opinion we should not take this kind of action against him. While I mostly lurk on python-dev/ideas, I interacted with him several times on the bug and meta trackers, rejecting/closing a number of suggestions/issues and accepting a few others. I did so merely on the value of the suggestion itself, and I can really easily ignore the tone of the message (e.g. frustrated, angry). That said, ISTM that the main problem is that the way he communicates is not really effective and that results in an energy drain for other people. This can be addressed on both the sides. The community should ignore the tone of the messages or even the messages themselves and most importantly avoid replies that convey the same negative feelings. People should be able to recognize when a discussion is not constructive anymore and leave it, rather than wasting time just to prove a point or to repeat themselves. (Note that this apply to everyone, and not to anatoly in particular). Regarding the effectiveness of the communications there's certainty room for improvement, but apparently the previous attempts to address the problem were unsuccessful. I'm willing to make an attempt myself, as I think I have a quite clear idea of the problem. Best Regards, Ezio Melotti cheers, Georg ___ python-committers mailing list python-committers@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-committers
Re: [python-committers] Anatoly Techtonik's contribution
On Wed, Dec 26, 2012 at 8:09 AM, Ezio Melotti ezio.melo...@gmail.com wrote: That said, ISTM that the main problem is that the way he communicates is not really effective and that results in an energy drain for other people. This can be addressed on both the sides. The community should ignore the tone of the messages or even the messages themselves and most importantly avoid replies that convey the same negative feelings. I've filtered his emails to the trash for almost two years now, but I'm not going to ignore that he's now discouraging my friends and colleagues from contribution. I already removed myself from the nosy list on a bunch of issues he created in the past, and the people who were willing to work with him are dropping off. I also will not ignore his tone about a GSoC contribution being useless. People should be able to recognize when a discussion is not constructive anymore and leave it, rather than wasting time just to prove a point or to repeat themselves. (Note that this apply to everyone, and not to anatoly in particular). Regarding the effectiveness of the communications there's certainty room for improvement, but apparently the previous attempts to address the problem were unsuccessful. I'm willing to make an attempt myself, as I think I have a quite clear idea of the problem. You're wasting your time if you think you will be the one to break through to him after several people have already talked to him. Apparently he even got on Skype with Guido about this. People would *pay* to have that chance. Anatoly got it for being a jerk and it changed nothing. ___ python-committers mailing list python-committers@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-committers
Re: [python-committers] Anatoly Techtonik's contribution
On Wed, Dec 26, 2012 at 11:28 PM, R. David Murray rdmur...@bitdance.com wrote: 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. Agreed. Being a welcoming community means *defaulting* to respect and giving people the benefit of the doubt. We ultimately created core-mentorship + python-ideas + python-dev as separate lists to provide people with an on-ramp to involvement, and we gently redirect posters to more appropriate locations. In the vast majority of cases, that gentle redirection has been completely sufficient - posters to the wrong list get the hint, switch to the correct list and (hopefully) receive more useful answers there. The problem that has arisen is what to do with people like Anatoly that expect the core developers to abide by *their* wishes, rather than accept that the development team has already established norms that they need to follow. Leaving it up to individuals to place people on email auto-ignore lists is avoiding the problem rather than resolving it, and clearly doesn't work for other shared resources like the tracker and the wiki. While it feels easier to let things run like that, because nobody wants to be the bad guy and say look, we know you're trying to help, but please, just stop, in the long term it's bad because of the toll it takes on the people that actually *are* helping. However, I also agree with David that we'd like guidelines a little more objective than congratulations, your behaviour has convinced almost all the core developers that have tried to deal with you extensively to start deleting your emails without reading them because you're almost certainly going to be wasting their time. Regards, Nick. -- Nick Coghlan | ncogh...@gmail.com | Brisbane, Australia ___ python-committers mailing list python-committers@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-committers
Re: [python-committers] Anatoly Techtonik's contribution
Dnia 26 gru 2012 o godz. 15:09 Ezio Melotti ezio.melo...@gmail.com napisał(a): The community should ignore the tone of the messages or even the messages themselves and most importantly avoid replies that convey the same negative feelings. People should be able to recognize when a discussion is not constructive anymore and leave it, rather than wasting time just to prove a point or to repeat themselves. The problem I see with that suggestion is that in reality we have to work with what we have, not with what we think we should have. I don't want to spell out names but I've had more than one discussion at conferences this year with people _afraid_ to get involved with core development on the base of having to deal with behaviour like this. In one case the comment was simply I don't have time to deal with [people] like him. The other case was sadder though: Looks like you core devs have trouble dealing with criticism, as shown by Anatoly. We strive to be a welcoming bunch and I'm convinced that a part of this is to call out anti-social behaviour and stop it. Otherwise our playground stops looking like a fun and safe place to contribute. This is not elitism nor censorship but a simple manner of respecting each other. Think: out of respect for Guido's (or other senior devs') time we should put an end to this. Judging from the YouTube view count, humanity has spent over 3000 years watching Gangnam Style. How much time did humanity spend on this thread and all other non-constructive threads/issues fired by Anatoly? -- Best regards, Łukasz Langa ___ python-committers mailing list python-committers@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-committers
Re: [python-committers] Commit privs for Serhiy Storchaka?
On Wed, Dec 26, 2012 at 3:30 PM, Nick Coghlan ncogh...@gmail.com wrote: Run through the sections here: http://docs.python.org/devguide/coredev.html#gaining-commit-privileges The main one is for Serhiy to send an email with his public SSH key to hgaccou...@python.org (I believe the folks on that list are also tracker admins) and set himself up with a read/write clone. http://docs.python.org/devguide/coredev.html#gaining-commit-privileges at start says something about «an official offer to become a Python core developer». Who have to send this letter and do we need to wait some time for getting possible objections from any developers? -- Thanks, Andrew Svetlov ___ python-committers mailing list python-committers@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-committers
Re: [python-committers] Commit privs for Serhiy Storchaka?
On 26 Dec, 2012, at 16:36, Andrew Svetlov andrew.svet...@gmail.com wrote: On Wed, Dec 26, 2012 at 3:30 PM, Nick Coghlan ncogh...@gmail.com wrote: Run through the sections here: http://docs.python.org/devguide/coredev.html#gaining-commit-privileges The main one is for Serhiy to send an email with his public SSH key to hgaccou...@python.org (I believe the folks on that list are also tracker admins) and set himself up with a read/write clone. http://docs.python.org/devguide/coredev.html#gaining-commit-privileges at start says something about «an official offer to become a Python core developer». Who have to send this letter and do we need to wait some time for getting possible objections from any developers? You've already done this step, the offer is that one of the existing core developers asks a potential new core developer if he (or she) is interested in becominging one (after asking here if there are any objections). Ronald -- Thanks, Andrew Svetlov ___ python-committers mailing list python-committers@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-committers ___ python-committers mailing list python-committers@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-committers
Re: [python-committers] Commit privs for Serhiy Storchaka?
On Wed, 26 Dec 2012 17:36:46 +0200, Andrew Svetlov andrew.svet...@gmail.com wrote: On Wed, Dec 26, 2012 at 3:30 PM, Nick Coghlan ncogh...@gmail.com wrote: Run through the sections here: http://docs.python.org/devguide/coredev.html#gaining-commit-privileges The main one is for Serhiy to send an email with his public SSH key to hgaccou...@python.org (I believe the folks on that list are also tracker admins) and set himself up with a read/write clone. http://docs.python.org/devguide/coredev.html#gaining-commit-privileges at start says something about «an official offer to become a Python core developer». Who have to send this letter and do we need to wait some time for getting possible objections from any developers? Consensus on this list is as official as it gets, and we've already allowed plenty of time for people to express objections. So the email asking him if he wanted to become a committer was the official offer :) --David ___ python-committers mailing list python-committers@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-committers
Re: [python-committers] Commit privs for Serhiy Storchaka?
Ok. Thanks. Sent to Serhiy link to instructions for next steps (http://docs.python.org/devguide/coredev.html#gaining-commit-privileges) as Nick suggested. On Wed, Dec 26, 2012 at 5:47 PM, R. David Murray rdmur...@bitdance.com wrote: On Wed, 26 Dec 2012 17:36:46 +0200, Andrew Svetlov andrew.svet...@gmail.com wrote: On Wed, Dec 26, 2012 at 3:30 PM, Nick Coghlan ncogh...@gmail.com wrote: Run through the sections here: http://docs.python.org/devguide/coredev.html#gaining-commit-privileges The main one is for Serhiy to send an email with his public SSH key to hgaccou...@python.org (I believe the folks on that list are also tracker admins) and set himself up with a read/write clone. http://docs.python.org/devguide/coredev.html#gaining-commit-privileges at start says something about «an official offer to become a Python core developer». Who have to send this letter and do we need to wait some time for getting possible objections from any developers? Consensus on this list is as official as it gets, and we've already allowed plenty of time for people to express objections. So the email asking him if he wanted to become a committer was the official offer :) --David ___ python-committers mailing list python-committers@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-committers -- Thanks, Andrew Svetlov ___ python-committers mailing list python-committers@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-committers
Re: [python-committers] Anatoly Techtonik's contribution
On Wed, Dec 26, 2012 at 5:07 PM, Łukasz Langa luk...@langa.pl wrote: Dnia 26 gru 2012 o godz. 15:09 Ezio Melotti ezio.melo...@gmail.com napisał(a): The community should ignore the tone of the messages or even the messages themselves and most importantly avoid replies that convey the same negative feelings. People should be able to recognize when a discussion is not constructive anymore and leave it, rather than wasting time just to prove a point or to repeat themselves. The problem I see with that suggestion is that in reality we have to work with what we have, not with what we think we should have. I don't want to spell out names but I've had more than one discussion at conferences this year with people _afraid_ to get involved with core development on the base of having to deal with behaviour like this. In one case the comment was simply I don't have time to deal with [people] like him. This is somewhat surprising to me. Why would they have to deal with him? If the people like him were the core developers I could understand the problem, but he is just one of the many contributors. The other case was sadder though: Looks like you core devs have trouble dealing with criticism, as shown by Anatoly. I'm not sure I understand this. ISTM that the problem here is with core devs, that are unable to deal with criticism (and have to resort to bans ;) rather than with him. We strive to be a welcoming bunch and I'm convinced that a part of this is to call out anti-social behaviour and stop it. Otherwise our playground stops looking like a fun and safe place to contribute. And a side effect of being welcoming is that you get every kind of people. Different people have different behaviors and skills. I don't think his lack of social skills is worse than e.g. the lack of English skills of some of the contributors. In both cases the intentions are not bad, but the message might be difficult to understand and thus can be misunderstood. These people shouldn't be marginalized just because of their lack of skills. As an example, I recently found out that one contributor on the tracker that sounded somewhat annoying actually was a ~10 years old kid. From that point of view his contributions went from somewhat annoying to quite impressive (and I think some of his patches have been committed too). Of course if people have an intentionally destructive behavior they can be stopped. This is not elitism nor censorship but a simple manner of respecting each other. Think: out of respect for Guido's (or other senior devs') time I heard this argument several time, but I'm not sure it's a really strong one. No one is forced to spend his time in any specific way. Granted, as a contributor you end up spending some of your time for this kind of things as well, but that also includes skimming through mails/comments that you don't care about, tell people that they wrote to wrong ML, that the issue they reported is invalid and so on. If people spend time reading his messages and responding to him, I assume they have reasons to do it. If this turns out to be ineffective they should stop. we should put an end to this. Judging from the YouTube view count, humanity has spent over 3000 years watching Gangnam Style. How much time did humanity spend on this thread and all other non-constructive threads/issues fired by Anatoly? This is not necessarily non-constructive. We have identified a problem and we are discussing about the possible ways it can be solved, while learning how to deal with similar problem should they occur again in the future. Best Regards, Ezio Melotti P.S. I haven't seen Gangnam Style yet -- I'm too busy tweaking rst markup in the docs :) --e.g. Best regards, Łukasz Langa ___ python-committers mailing list python-committers@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-committers
Re: [python-committers] Anatoly Techtonik's contribution
On Wed, Dec 26, 2012 at 10:20 AM, Ezio Melotti ezio.melo...@gmail.com wrote: And a side effect of being welcoming is that you get every kind of people. Different people have different behaviors and skills. I don't think his lack of social skills is worse than e.g. the lack of English skills of some of the contributors. In both cases the intentions are not bad, but the message might be difficult to understand and thus can be misunderstood. These people shouldn't be marginalized just because of their lack of skills. Now we're just trying to marginalize abuse. There is no lack of skills that is causing this, and it's not any sort of misunderstanding. Nick has presented numerous examples of this. ___ python-committers mailing list python-committers@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-committers
Re: [python-committers] Anatoly Techtonik's contribution
No, I never got on Skype with Anatoly. I did write a very frank email and got the usual response. I don't think I am up to doing anything more about him. He doesn't bother me that much, I ignore most of his threads. He is a reviewer and committer on Rietveld and behaves better there. --Guido On Wednesday, December 26, 2012, Brian Curtin wrote: On Wed, Dec 26, 2012 at 8:09 AM, Ezio Melotti ezio.melo...@gmail.comjavascript:; wrote: That said, ISTM that the main problem is that the way he communicates is not really effective and that results in an energy drain for other people. This can be addressed on both the sides. The community should ignore the tone of the messages or even the messages themselves and most importantly avoid replies that convey the same negative feelings. I've filtered his emails to the trash for almost two years now, but I'm not going to ignore that he's now discouraging my friends and colleagues from contribution. I already removed myself from the nosy list on a bunch of issues he created in the past, and the people who were willing to work with him are dropping off. I also will not ignore his tone about a GSoC contribution being useless. People should be able to recognize when a discussion is not constructive anymore and leave it, rather than wasting time just to prove a point or to repeat themselves. (Note that this apply to everyone, and not to anatoly in particular). Regarding the effectiveness of the communications there's certainty room for improvement, but apparently the previous attempts to address the problem were unsuccessful. I'm willing to make an attempt myself, as I think I have a quite clear idea of the problem. You're wasting your time if you think you will be the one to break through to him after several people have already talked to him. Apparently he even got on Skype with Guido about this. People would *pay* to have that chance. Anatoly got it for being a jerk and it changed nothing. ___ python-committers mailing list python-committers@python.org javascript:; http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-committers -- --Guido van Rossum (python.org/~guido) ___ python-committers mailing list python-committers@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-committers
Re: [python-committers] Anatoly Techtonik's contribution
People have the entire internet to abuse us (and they do). That's why I spend as much time as I do explaining *why* various things in Python are the way they are. However, we shouldn't have to put up with disrespectful bullshit on our own communication channels. Those are for us to collaborate on getting things done, not for Anatoly to whine incessantly about the world being something other than exactly the way *he* thinks it should be. And yes, putting off potential contributors by continuing to tolerate his poisonous behaviour is *definitely* something we should be worried about. Regards, Nick. -- Sent from my phone, thus the relative brevity :) ___ python-committers mailing list python-committers@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-committers
Re: [python-committers] privacy
Le mercredi 26 décembre 2012 à 08:08 -0800, Eli Bendersky a écrit : At the risk of stating something that I imagine everyone already knows, this list is itself publicly viewable: http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-committers So in some sense what we write here is already being said beyond this list (though not actively). For example, the thread we're engaging in right now is the second result when Googling python anatoly. I guess my point is that what's going on is already pretty open to the outside (from a read-only perspective). Ouch, this is important to keep in mind. Thanks for the reminder, Chris. This may be a different discussion altogether, but I'm pretty sure that sometimes people write to this list assuming it's private to committers only. Should it be? I personally think it is very sane for this list to be public. Regards Antoine. ___ python-committers mailing list python-committers@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-committers
Re: [python-committers] Anatoly Techtonik's contribution
On Wed, Dec 26, 2012 at 4:18 PM, Brian Curtin br...@python.org wrote: You're wasting your time if you think you will be the one to break through to him after several people have already talked to him. Apparently he even got on Skype with Guido about this. People would *pay* to have that chance. Anatoly got it for being a jerk and it changed nothing. So, I contacted him and we chatted for about an hour. He said that he's been trying to pay more attention and improve his messages lately. We went through a list of problems and he was willing to listen (he actually seemed more polite than I expected). He also seemed somewhat frustrated by the fact that his messages are taken in a negative way, because he doesn't mean to be negative. I also went through his recent messages on the tracker to find negative examples but admittedly they mostly seem OK, so I wonder if our opinion towards him is already negatively biased and leads us to be less tolerant with him At the end he thanked me for bringing this up with him, and apparently he is willing to improve. Best Regards, Ezio Melotti ___ python-committers mailing list python-committers@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-committers
Re: [python-committers] Anatoly Techtonik's contribution
Hello, I agree with Brian and Nick. While I don't bother much with Anatoly anymore (I ignore at least 95% of his postings), I think it is not nice to let newcomers deal with the cognitive overhead of reading and appreciating his ramblings. That said he doesn't need to be banned from *all* of python.org. Each mailing-list can take individual action. And the justification needn't be verbose. A two-line public message saying For the record, Anatoly Techtonik has been banned from this mailing-list after the request of numerous contributors is enough. Regards Antoine. Le mercredi 26 décembre 2012 à 08:18 -0600, Brian Curtin a écrit : On Wed, Dec 26, 2012 at 8:09 AM, Ezio Melotti ezio.melo...@gmail.com wrote: That said, ISTM that the main problem is that the way he communicates is not really effective and that results in an energy drain for other people. This can be addressed on both the sides. The community should ignore the tone of the messages or even the messages themselves and most importantly avoid replies that convey the same negative feelings. I've filtered his emails to the trash for almost two years now, but I'm not going to ignore that he's now discouraging my friends and colleagues from contribution. I already removed myself from the nosy list on a bunch of issues he created in the past, and the people who were willing to work with him are dropping off. I also will not ignore his tone about a GSoC contribution being useless. People should be able to recognize when a discussion is not constructive anymore and leave it, rather than wasting time just to prove a point or to repeat themselves. (Note that this apply to everyone, and not to anatoly in particular). Regarding the effectiveness of the communications there's certainty room for improvement, but apparently the previous attempts to address the problem were unsuccessful. I'm willing to make an attempt myself, as I think I have a quite clear idea of the problem. You're wasting your time if you think you will be the one to break through to him after several people have already talked to him. Apparently he even got on Skype with Guido about this. People would *pay* to have that chance. Anatoly got it for being a jerk and it changed nothing. ___ python-committers mailing list python-committers@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-committers ___ python-committers mailing list python-committers@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-committers
Re: [python-committers] Anatoly Techtonik's contribution
On Wed, 26 Dec 2012 18:20:06 +0200, Ezio Melotti ezio.melo...@gmail.com wrote: On Wed, Dec 26, 2012 at 5:07 PM, Åukasz Langa luk...@langa.pl wrote: I don't want to spell out names but I've had more than one discussion at conferences this year with people _afraid_ to get involved with core development on the base of having to deal with behaviour like this. In one case the comment was simply I don't have time to deal with [people] like him. This is somewhat surprising to me. Why would they have to deal with him? If the people like him were the core developers I could understand the problem, but he is just one of the many contributors. Because, to put it in new age-y terms, his bad vibrations are poisoning the environment. That is perhaps a graphic way to put it, but it is a matter of community tone and nurturing a joyful and creative environment in which all are welcome and feel encouraged to contribute. Anatoly works against that, almost constantly. Encouraging him to support the community would be *much* better than banning him...but we've tried that. The other case was sadder though: Looks like you core devs have trouble dealing with criticism, as shown by Anatoly. I'm not sure I understand this. ISTM that the problem here is with core devs, that are unable to deal with criticism (and have to resort to bans ;) rather than with him. By not understand, I presume you mean the sadder comment. It is not that we are *unable* to deal with criticism. We have dealt reasonably with every criticism he has leveled, I think. But his comments create the *perception* that we are not dealing well with criticism, because he is not but casts the aspersion onto us, while we do that much less frequently to him, but do occasionally lapse into returning tit for tat. Since we are perceived as the ones in the position of power, we get castigated for our actions and reactions much more than Anatoly, the one perceived to be powerless in the situation, ever will be. Let me repeat that bit, it is important. We are perceived as being the ones in the position of power, and he the powerless. That perception (and the reality behind it) will color every conversation that the wider community has about this issue. That is why I stress that our position and our actions have to come from well articulated principles, otherwise they will be perceived as caprice. Which, I think, is more or less why you are arguing we should not take action. However, dealing reasonably with him gets harder and harder over time. It is a failing in me as a person, but every time I see a message from Anatoly, my gut clenches up and I go into a defensive mode, and want to prove him wrong. So I have to master myself and try to speak reasonably, and try to not give back to him what he gives to us. I hope I'm getting better at that, but... Take issue 16781 as a recent example. I wanted to prove him wrong, both because of his past actions and because of my perception (probably colored by those past actions) of his choice of title for the issue (execfile/exec messes up...) But there is a real (documentation) issue there. I managed to moderate my tone...almost. I still failed: I said the fact that the print works should be a clue, implying that he should have seen it himself, But if I were dealing with anyone else, I would have said, The fact that the print works is a clue... This difference is *subtle*. But those subtleties are *important* in determining the tone of a community, the supportiveness of a community, the openness of a community, the inclusiveness of a community. Someone reading my comment on that bug without knowing Anatoly's history would think that the Python community is very stuck up. It is so easy to forget that our words to Anatoly are not read just by him, but by many many other people. Anatoly spreads negativity almost (but not every!) time he opens his mouth, negativity which is then compounded by our natural human reactions to his tone. Yes it would be great if we could all master ourselves and always speak to him reasonably no matter the provocation, and yes we absolutely should strive very hard for that goal. It should be one of our guiding principles as a community. But is that enough? Remember, the issue isn't just *us*, the issue is also the effect on people with whom we never interact directly, people who may flee the community, or not join it, because of the negativity produced by both sides. Full disclosure: despite arguing here for *doing something* about Anatoly, I am in fact somewhat ambivalent about what. I have no problem with banning him for specific actions (such as a ban from the tracker for repeatedly reopening an issue). But what, if any, other actions should be taken I am not clear on. We strive to be a welcoming bunch and I'm convinced that a part of this is to call out anti-social behaviour and stop it. Otherwise our playground stops looking like a fun and
Re: [python-committers] privacy
On 12/26/2012 06:17 PM, Eli Bendersky wrote: At the risk of stating something that I imagine everyone already knows, this list is itself publicly viewable: http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-committers So in some sense what we write here is already being said beyond this list (though not actively). For example, the thread we're engaging in right now is the second result when Googling python anatoly. I guess my point is that what's going on is already pretty open to the outside (from a read-only perspective). Ouch, this is important to keep in mind. Thanks for the reminder, Chris. This may be a different discussion altogether, but I'm pretty sure that sometimes people write to this list assuming it's private to committers only. Should it be? I personally think it is very sane for this list to be public. Definitely. There have been enough complaints about secrecy surrounding the PSF, no need to start with CPython development. I agree there're very strong reasons to keep it public. I just wanted to emphasize Chris's note because I'm pretty sure that some devs assume it's not public when writing on controversial topics (like the recent conversation). Another benefit of using lists through gmane: if it's on there, it must be public :) cheers, Georg ___ python-committers mailing list python-committers@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-committers
Re: [python-committers] privacy
On Wed, 26 Dec 2012 17:54:01 +0100, Antoine Pitrou solip...@pitrou.net wrote: Le mercredi 26 décembre 2012 à 08:08 -0800, Eli Bendersky a écrit : At the risk of stating something that I imagine everyone already knows, this list is itself publicly viewable: http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-committers So in some sense what we write here is already being said beyond this list (though not actively). For example, the thread we're engaging in right now is the second result when Googling python anatoly. I guess my point is that what's going on is already pretty open to the outside (from a read-only perspective). Ouch, this is important to keep in mind. Thanks for the reminder, Chris. This may be a different discussion altogether, but I'm pretty sure that sometimes people write to this list assuming it's private to committers only. Should it be? I personally think it is very sane for this list to be public. And I agree, as I noted previously in the middle of a longer post :) --David ___ python-committers mailing list python-committers@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-committers
Re: [python-committers] Anatoly Techtonik's contribution
On Wed, 26 Dec 2012 18:56:54 +0200, Ezio Melotti ezio.melo...@gmail.com wrote: On Wed, Dec 26, 2012 at 4:18 PM, Brian Curtin br...@python.org wrote: You're wasting your time if you think you will be the one to break through to him after several people have already talked to him. Apparently he even got on Skype with Guido about this. People would *pay* to have that chance. Anatoly got it for being a jerk and it changed nothing. So, I contacted him and we chatted for about an hour. He said that he's been trying to pay more attention and improve his messages lately. We went through a list of problems and he was willing to listen (he actually seemed more polite than I expected). He also seemed somewhat frustrated by the fact that his messages are taken in a negative way, because he doesn't mean to be negative. I also went through his recent messages on the tracker to find negative examples but admittedly they mostly seem OK, so I wonder if our opinion towards him is already negatively biased and leads us to be less tolerant with him At the end he thanked me for bringing this up with him, and apparently he is willing to improve. This is great. Certainly my reading of the issue title I mentioned in my previous email was an overreaction. I will do my best to reset my personal filters :) --David ___ python-committers mailing list python-committers@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-committers
Re: [python-committers] Commit privs for Serhiy Storchaka?
Le mercredi 26 décembre 2012 à 18:38 +0100, Georg Brandl a écrit : The SSH key is added; tracker privileges were already given. Welcome Serhiy! Welcome indeed (und fröhlich Weihnachten)! Regards Antoine. ___ python-committers mailing list python-committers@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-committers
Re: [python-committers] Commit privs for Serhiy Storchaka?
середа 26 грудень 2012 19:44:34 Eli Bendersky ви написали: On Wed, Dec 26, 2012 at 9:38 AM, Georg Brandl g.bra...@gmx.net wrote: The SSH key is added; tracker privileges were already given. Welcome Serhiy! Yes, welcome! Serhiy, if you haven't already done so, please subscribe to python-committers. Thanks. My request has been forwarded to the list moderator for approval. ___ python-committers mailing list python-committers@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-committers
Re: [python-committers] Commit privs for Serhiy Storchaka?
On 12/26/2012 1:00 PM, Serhiy Storchaka wrote: середа 26 грудень 2012 19:44:34 Eli Bendersky ви написали: On Wed, Dec 26, 2012 at 9:38 AM, Georg Brandl g.bra...@gmx.net wrote: The SSH key is added; tracker privileges were already given. Welcome Serhiy! Yes, welcome! Serhiy, if you haven't already done so, please subscribe to python-committers. Thanks. My request has been forwarded to the list moderator for approval. And I approved it. Welcome, Serhiy! -- Eric. ___ python-committers mailing list python-committers@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-committers
Re: [python-committers] Anatoly Techtonik's contribution
Wiadomość napisana przez Ezio Melotti ezio.melo...@gmail.com w dniu 26 gru 2012, o godz. 17:56: At the end he thanked me for bringing this up with him, and apparently he is willing to improve. Full disclosure: I'm not buying it. But I'd *love* to be proven wrong and am willing to give him time to show that his attitude improved. At worst, we can treat your conversation as the explicit warning other committers asked about. -- Best regards, Łukasz Langa ___ python-committers mailing list python-committers@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-committers
Re: [python-committers] Anatoly Techtonik's contribution
On Wed, Dec 26, 2012 at 5:28 AM, R. David Murray rdmur...@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 ___ python-committers mailing list python-committers@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-committers
Re: [python-committers] Anatoly Techtonik's contribution
On Wed, Dec 26, 2012 at 7:37 PM, R. David Murray rdmur...@bitdance.comwrote: On Wed, 26 Dec 2012 18:20:06 +0200, Ezio Melotti ezio.melo...@gmail.com wrote: On Wed, Dec 26, 2012 at 5:07 PM, Łukasz Langa luk...@langa.pl wrote: I don't want to spell out names but I've had more than one discussion at conferences this year with people _afraid_ to get involved with core development on the base of having to deal with behaviour like this. In one case the comment was simply I don't have time to deal with [people] like him. This is somewhat surprising to me. Why would they have to deal with him? If the people like him were the core developers I could understand the problem, but he is just one of the many contributors. Because, to put it in new age-y terms, his bad vibrations are poisoning the environment. I considered this but probably underestimated it -- after all there are many other contributors that produce enough good vibrations. My skewed perception might be due to the fact that I don't contribute actively to the python-dev/ideas MLs. That is perhaps a graphic way to put it, but it is a matter of community tone and nurturing a joyful and creative environment in which all are welcome and feel encouraged to contribute. Anatoly works against that, almost constantly. Encouraging him to support the community would be *much* better than banning him...but we've tried that. The other case was sadder though: Looks like you core devs have trouble dealing with criticism, as shown by Anatoly. I'm not sure I understand this. ISTM that the problem here is with core devs, that are unable to deal with criticism (and have to resort to bans ;) rather than with him. By not understand, I presume you mean the sadder comment. It is not that we are *unable* to deal with criticism. We have dealt reasonably with every criticism he has leveled, I think. But his comments create the *perception* that we are not dealing well with criticism, because he is not but casts the aspersion onto us, while we do that much less frequently to him, but do occasionally lapse into returning tit for tat. Since we are perceived as the ones in the position of power, we get castigated for our actions and reactions much more than Anatoly, the one perceived to be powerless in the situation, ever will be. Let me repeat that bit, it is important. We are perceived as being the ones in the position of power, and he the powerless. That perception (and the reality behind it) will color every conversation that the wider community has about this issue. That is why I stress that our position and our actions have to come from well articulated principles, otherwise they will be perceived as caprice. Which, I think, is more or less why you are arguing we should not take action. Good point, and that's indeed one of the reasons why I'm against taking actions. If we do people might get scared away because they don't want to be banned or because they think we are not open to criticism or new ideas. However, dealing reasonably with him gets harder and harder over time. It is a failing in me as a person, but every time I see a message from Anatoly, my gut clenches up and I go into a defensive mode, and want to prove him wrong. Knowing this, I actually try to see if there's something good in his suggestions so that they don't get overlooked by devs that are ignoring him (that depends on the issues though). So I have to master myself and try to speak reasonably, and try to not give back to him what he gives to us. I hope I'm getting better at that, but... That's laudable, and I wish everyone else would do that. Take issue 16781 as a recent example. I wanted to prove him wrong, both because of his past actions and because of my perception (probably colored by those past actions) of his choice of title for the issue (execfile/exec messes up...) But there is a real (documentation) issue there. We discussed about that, but unfortunately I missed the original title. My criticism (albeit mild) was about the use of the word magical(ly) that seems to imply that the behavior of Python is magical and obscure. He said that from his point of view the behavior looked magical, and I don't think he meant it as a non-constructive criticism against Python. I managed to moderate my tone...almost. I still failed: I said the fact that the print works should be a clue, implying that he should have seen it himself, But if I were dealing with anyone else, I would have said, The fact that the print works is a clue... This difference is *subtle*. But those subtleties are *important* in determining the tone of a community, the supportiveness of a community, the openness of a community, the inclusiveness of a community. Someone reading my comment on that bug without knowing Anatoly's history would think that the Python community is very stuck up. It is so easy to
Re: [python-committers] Anatoly Techtonik's contribution
-BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE- Hash: SHA1 On 26/12/12 17:38, Brian Curtin wrote: On Wed, Dec 26, 2012 at 10:20 AM, Ezio Melotti ezio.melo...@gmail.com wrote: And a side effect of being welcoming is that you get every kind of people. Different people have different behaviors and skills. I don't think his lack of social skills is worse than e.g. the lack of English skills of some of the contributors. In both cases the intentions are not bad, but the message might be difficult to understand and thus can be misunderstood. These people shouldn't be marginalized just because of their lack of skills. Now we're just trying to marginalize abuse. There is no lack of skills that is causing this, and it's not any sort of misunderstanding. Nick has presented numerous examples of this. I found this text very interesting and quite valuable: http://producingoss.com/ Notably relevant here: http://producingoss.com/en/difficult-people.html - -- Jesús Cea Avión _/_/ _/_/_/_/_/_/ j...@jcea.es - http://www.jcea.es/ _/_/_/_/ _/_/_/_/ _/_/ jabber / xmpp:j...@jabber.org _/_/_/_/ _/_/_/_/_/ . _/_/ _/_/_/_/ _/_/ _/_/ Things are not so easy _/_/ _/_/_/_/ _/_/_/_/ _/_/ My name is Dump, Core Dump _/_/_/_/_/_/ _/_/ _/_/ El amor es poner tu felicidad en la felicidad de otro - Leibniz -BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE- Version: GnuPG v1.4.10 (GNU/Linux) Comment: Using GnuPG with undefined - http://www.enigmail.net/ iQCVAwUBUNuae5lgi5GaxT1NAQIsAQP/V6i6HcA46hyYhcw5robNJrL/mkTcvaSD W4EzbKZOjoZqSlAAvx2YeedU+STb7CW+staBrQzmrmDP9VSqJyyuLQzyv4veskBw vRaysmVltycyUhwMm83fla542GIaGqFUJz3W2Sv+F3B+qiWjr/xSSVNLjGc5n2fZ odrG/MfhzvA= =S19p -END PGP SIGNATURE- ___ python-committers mailing list python-committers@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-committers
