Final statement from Steering Council on politically-charged commit messages

[Kyle Stanley]

On Mon, Aug 17, 2020 at 2:37 PM Chris Angelico <rosuav at gmail.com> wrote:

> Yes. I was hoping for "we should rewrite that commit", and would have
> been content with "we won't rewrite it, but we don't want that
> repeated". But the SC said that it is absolutely fine to write commit
> messages like that.
>

While I'm also not entirely content with the outcome (specifically that the
commit message would have been left as-is, even if it was easy to edit
post-merge) and would have liked to see a similar statement along the lines
of the above, I don't consider the current statement by the SC to be saying
that it's "absolutely fine" to write similar commit messages in the future.
Instead, I interpret it as the SC collectively not being strongly against
the commit message in question enough to make an amendment; e.g. they don't
consider it egregious enough to take direct action or publicly condemn it,
and possibly that doing so would not result in a net benefit to the Python
development community.

This interpretation may require a bit of reading between the lines because
there was no explicit mention by the SC of the commit message being
problematic. However, if they considered it to be perfectly fine and having
no issues at all, I think it would have been said outright, and this issue
would have ended a long time ago instead of them addressing it several
times.

Going forward, I think the drama from this situation alone will cause us
core developers to more carefully assess commit messages before going
forward with merging PRs to ensure they focus on the changes being made.
When I find the spare cycles to do so, I'm also hoping that I can make a
minor addition to the "Making Good Commits" section of the devguide
<https://devguide.python.org/pullrequest/#making-good-commits>, to guide
future commit messages towards focusing on a technical summary of the
changes made and avoiding unrelated commentary.

In the meantime, I don't think there's anything productive we can gain from
further discussion of this particular commit message. At the end of the
day, I suspect it will become buried in the git history and forgotten about
since it was associated with a minor change. If anything, further threads
about it will just end up bringing more attention to the message than it
would have otherwise received. Instead of exhausting more cycles on this,
I'd just like to move past this issue and go back to what I actually care
about - contributing to Python.