[python-committers] Votes on new core dev candidates

[Steve Dower]

On 25Mar2019 0217, M.-A. Lemburg wrote:
> I must say, I'm a bit surprised by the discussion around the voting
> process and the candidates.
> 
> First, we've been complaining about lack of core devs for a long
> time. Now we have two great candidates with proven track record of
> contributing to Python and people complain again. As a small group,
> we need to attract more capable people and such push back
> is not a very productive way of doing so.

To be clear, my pushback (on Discourse, since I can only send email from 
an actual laptop these days but can participate over there from my 
phone) has been against vague nominations, not the individuals themselves.

I'm *very* concerned about the perception of commit rights being 
"awarded" rather than being a added responsibility specific to CPython. 
Nominees should be willing to take on extra responsibility, and 
nominators should be making clear that the nominee is at least somewhat 
proven to be ready for it. Nominations for being a good contributor to 
other projects makes no sense, and nominations without a specific role 
or focus area are also vague enough that I don't see it leading to 
longer standing commitment.

I don't necessarily want to formalize a specific set of rules or things 
that people have to do in order to become a core developer. But I do 
want to avoid creating a culture of "this person is nice and built a 
nice library let's give them commit rights". The PSF already recognizes 
people for these contributions, which is the right way to do it.

If the core committers (via the SC) also want to offer a vote of thanks 
to a community member, then sure, we can do that. But keep it separate 
from "we trust you to modify the language/runtime/core tools without 
oversight".

> If people feel they need more guidance, they should ask the ones
> who nominated the candidates - in public or in private. Because the
> candidates themselves cannot comment (at least not on this list;
> don't know about discourse), such discussions have to be
> moderated by the nominating parties with care.

Isn't this what's been happening? It certainly has been on Discourse. 
FWIW, it'd be great if there was a way to add someone to a single thread 
so they _could_ post there - Stefan in particular has had to email a few 
of us off-list to respond to our queries (though in doing so has proven 
his commitment, at least as far as I'm concerned, so overall it probably 
worked out better :) ).

Cheers,
STeve