[python-committers] Anatoly Techtonik's contribution

[Georg Brandl]

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 <ncoghlan at 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 Anatoly because unlike Anatoly, he does not acknowledge 
> contrary facts or answer questions but just repeats the same stupid or 
> irrational generalizations that are based on one fact.
> 
> The one fact is that str.find, and hence str.replace, is much slower in 
> 3.3 than 3.2. Because of his report of that fact, there is an issue on 
> the tracker. Jim will not even acknowledge that he did get an issue 
> opened because *that* fact undercuts his narrative about our indifference.
> 
> Anyway:
> 1. I find Jim *much* more annoying and destructive than Anatoly. (This 
> is possibly one reason Anatoly, by comparison, does not bother me as 
> much as others).
> 2. The response on python-list is that one or more regulars (sometimes 
> me, often others) responds to each repetition, more of less politely and 
> rationally, as the spirit moves us. If you are worried about bad PR, 
> driving Anatoly to become like Jim on python-list would be the wrong 
> thing to do.
> 
>> 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.
> 
> --
> Terry Jan Reedy
> 
> 
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