Final statement from Steering Council on politically-charged commit messages

[Chris Angelico]

On Wed, Aug 19, 2020 at 7:11 AM Kyle Stanley <aeros167 at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> 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.
>

If you read the thread above the post in question, you'll find that
the SC specifically decided NOT to speak out against the commit
message. I was asking for them to make a statement saying that the
message was unacceptable and should not be repeated, and they decided
not to. In other words, it's not just that they aren't editing it, but
they are actively refusing to reject future commits on the same lines.
"Even if it was easy to edit post-merge we would still leave the
message as-is". It's not "too much upheaval to edit it now, it's too
late, leave it there". It's "even if it were easy we still wouldn't,
because we don't dislike this commit message".

If I'm misinterpreting that, please can a SC member explain in more
detail what the statement actually means? Otherwise, I have to assume
that the SC approves of it.

ChrisA