[Python-Dev] About multiprocessing maintainership

[Davin Potts]

Antoine's change to the devguide was made on the basis that "he doesn't
contribute anymore" which, going by Antoine's own description in this
thread, he contradicts.

My current effort, mentioned in Antoine's other thread, is not my single
largest contribution.  I have been impressed by the volume of time that
Antoine is able to spend on the issue tracker. Because he and I generally
agree on what actions to take on an issue, when he is quick to jump on
issues it is uncommon for me to feel the need to say something myself just
to play a numbers game or to make my presence felt -- that's part of being
a team.  There have been incidents where I disagree with Antoine and
explain the reasoning in an issue but later Antoine goes on to do whatever
he wants, disregarding what I wrote -- because I am not in a position to
necessarily react or respond as frequently, I've generally only discovered
this much later.  I regard this latter interaction as unhealthy.

I have been part of several group discussions (among core developers) now
regarding how to balance the efforts of contributors with copious time to
devote versus those which must be extra judicious in how they spend their
more limited time.  We recognize this as an ongoing concern and here it is
again.  If we are supportive of one another, we can find a way to work
through such things.

I joined the core developer team to help others and give back especially
when it involved the then-neglected multiprocessing module.  When I am
personally attacked in a discussion on an issue by someone I do not know,
it hurts and demoralizes me -- I know that all of the core developers
experience this.  When I am spending time on multiprocessing only to be
surprised by a claim that I don't contribute anymore, it hurts and
demoralizes me.  When I read hand-picked statistics to support a slanted
narrative designed to belittle my contributions, it hurts and demoralizes
me.  I know different people react to such things differently but in my
case I have occasionally needed to take time away from cpython to detox --
in 2018, such incidents led to my losing more than a month of time more
than once.

Regarding support for one another:  At the core developer sprint last year,
I volunteered to remotely host Antoine on my laptop so that he could
video-conference into the governance discussions we were having there.  A
few weeks later, Antoine is "editing me out" of the maintainers list
without any further communication.  If we only let the loudest people
contribute then we lose the quiet contributors and push them out.



Davin



On Mon, Feb 4, 2019 at 4:39 AM Antoine Pitrou <solipsis at pitrou.net> wrote:

>
> Hello,
>
> In a recent message, Raymond dramatically pretends that I would have
> "edited out" Davin of the maintainers list for the multiprocessing
> module.
>
> What I did (*) is different: I asked to mark Davin inactive and to stop
> auto-assigning him on bug tracker issues.  Davin was /still/ listed in
> the experts list, along with me and others.  IOW, there was no "editing
> out".
>
> (*) https://github.com/python/devguide/pull/435
>
> The reason I did this is simple: Davin does not do, and has almost
> never done, any actual maintenance work on multiprocessing (if you are
> not convinced, just go through the git history, and the PRs that were
> merged in the ~4 last years).  He usually does not respond to tracker
> issues opened by users.  He does not review PRs.  The only sizable
> piece of work he committed is, as I mentioned in the previous thread,
> still untested and undocumented.
>
> Auto-assigning someone who never (AFAICT) responds to issues ultimately
> does a disservice to users, whose complaints go unanswered; while other
> people, who /do/ respond to users, are not aware of those stale issues.
>
> Regards
>
> Antoine.
>
>
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