[python-committers] Anatoly Techtonik's contribution

[Nick Coghlan]

On Wed, Dec 26, 2012 at 11:28 PM, R. David Murray <rdmurray at 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   |   ncoghlan at gmail.com   |   Brisbane, Australia