[python-committers] Anatoly Techtonik's contribution

[Nick Coghlan]

On Thu, Nov 8, 2012 at 10:21 AM, John Benediktsson <mrjbq7 at gmail.com> wrote:
> Out of curiousity, I googled Anatoly and python-ideas and this thread[1]
> seems a useful example.  His suggestions seem intended to help, he provided
> some code examples, and made only a handful of posts in support of his idea
> (receiving a few negative responses).

The problem isn't that he's always wrong, the problem is that the
signal to noise ratio is awful and attempting to filter the good ideas
from the bad wastes a whole lot of time for a whole lot of people. For
more typical illustrations of our past interactions with him, look up
his attempts to get us to migrate from mailing lists to Google Wave
(what a great idea that would have been), his comments on MoinMoin as
a wiki technology, his comments on the Roundup installation, and his
comments on the PyPI packaging ecosystem.

The entire problem is summed up in the first two paragraphs of this
post: http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-ideas/2012-June/015304.html
(my quoted comment and Anatoly's reply). His proudly declared attitude
of "I can't be assed doing any research into what's already happening
in this area or why things are the way they are, and I won't listen
when anyone tries to inform me of those things, so I'm going to make
everyone waste their time reading my uninformed BS opinions" does not
a net-positive community member make. Yes, that was one of the threads
that finally made me pull the trigger on routing his emails to
/dev/null

It stands in stark contrast to the approach of someone like Daniel
Holth, who saw some similar problems with PyPI, researched the current
state of the art within the community, and then went ahead and created
something (the wheel archive format) that's going to go a long way
towards addressing many of them.

There comes a time when even an inclusive community has to ask itself
"Is trying to include *this particular* person alienating current or
potential community members that refuse to spend their time in an
environment that tolerates these kinds of antics?".

Regards,
Nick.

-- 
Nick Coghlan   |   ncoghlan at gmail.com   |   Brisbane, Australia