On Tue, Jul 30, 2013 at 4:58 PM, Donald Stufft <don...@stufft.io> wrote: > Hrm. > > So I hear what you're saying and part of the problem is likely due to the > history > of where I tried to get a change through and then felt like all I was getting > was > stop energy and people wanting to keep the status quo which ultimately > ended up preventing changes has lead me to view distutils-sig in more of an > adversarial light then is probably appropriate for the distutils-sig of 2013 > (versus > the distutils-sig of 2011/2012). This is probably reflected in my tone and > likely > has others, such as yourself, respond similarly, pushing us further down that > path. My thought process has become "Ok here's something that needs to > happen, now how do I get distutils-sig not to prevent it from happening".
Thanks for the thoughtful response. I appreciate it. I also want to just throw in one extra piece of information for you and anybody else reading this: 99% of "stop energy" doesn't happen because people actively want to prevent progress or frustrate other people. It simply happens when people notice a problem but don't have as much personal stake in your goal as they do in not experiencing the problem they will experience (or perceive they will), from the proposed change. When you look at it from this perspective, it's easier to understand that the way to fix this is with more engagement on their part, which can only be gotten by engagement on your part. When I first proposed WSGI, the initial reaction of Web-SIG was pretty negative. "Stop energy" if you will. Things only moved forward once I was able to channel the energy of objections into offering solutions. It's helpful to remember that asking, "okay, so how you would recommend I do it?" *doesn't* obligate you to actually follow all of the recommendations you get. (Especially since some of them will be mutually contradictory!) Anyway, I guess what I'm saying is that people lacking enthusiasm for your goals is not really them trying to stop you. In fact, objections are a positive thing: it means you got somebody's attention. The next step is to leverage that attention into actually getting help, or at least more constructive input. ;-) It's true that some individuals will never provide really helpful input. In the WSGI effort, there were people whose advice I never took, because their goals were directed entirely opposite to where I wanted to go. But I remained engaged until it was mutually clear (or at least I thought it was) that our goals were different, and didn't try to persuade them to go in the same direction. Such attempts at persuasion are pretty much a waste of time, and a big energy drain. Consensus-building is something that you do with people who have at least some goals in common, so it's best to focus on finding out what you *do* agree on. > This was again reflected in the Python 2.3 discussion because my immediate > reaction and impression was that you were attempting to block the move > from MD5 due to Python 2.3, which I felt 2.3 wasn't worth blocking > enhancements > to PyPI. The "snark" in my statements primarily came from that feeling of > someone was trying to "shut down" an enhancement. Right. In such a case, a question you could ask is, "Do you agree in general that we should move to a better hash at some point in the future?", because then the disagreement can be narrowed down to timeframe, migration or deprecation process, etc. The truth is, I had no intention of "blocking the move", I had concerns I wanted addressed about the impact, timing and process. (Actually, I originally just noticed a couple of errors in what you'd laid out as the current state of things, and wanted to make sure they were included in the assessment.) The point is, if somebody doesn't have *any* common ground with you, it's unlikely they're even talking to you. At the very least, if they're talking with you about PyPI, they must care about PyPI, even if they care about different things than you, or with different relative priorities. ;-) > As far as how to fix it I don't have a particularly magic answer. I will try > to be more > mindful of my tone and that distutils-sig is likely not my adversary anymore > as well > as try to ask questions instead of arguing the relevance immediately. Again, thank you. And hopefully, remember that probably nobody was intentionally being your adversary before, either. As the old adage says, the best way to destroy your enemies is to make friends with them. ;-) And we do that by focusing on common ground, and inviting participation. (This is again not to say that I've been 100% Mr. Wonderful myself; I know I haven't. But the community's best consensus-building happens when somebody is doing the tough work of engaging with all parties. Sometimes this doesn't happen, alas; back when I was developing setuptools there just weren't enough people interested in the problems available on Distutils-SIG to build any sort of consensus on the solutions, so I *had* to go run with the ball myself. I'm really happy that there is now BOTH a quorum of interested parties who understand the problems, AND a few leaders able to drive the consensus-building and actual development. If only we had done this ten years ago, setuptools might not have been necessary. Well, actually, that's probably not true: without *something* existing first, that quorum of people who understand the problem wouldn't have existed back then. But you know what I mean.) _______________________________________________ Distutils-SIG maillist - Distutils-SIG@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/distutils-sig
