On 29.09.2018 11:40, Łukasz Langa wrote: > >> On Sep 29, 2018, at 09:53, Nick Coghlan <ncogh...@gmail.com> wrote: >> >> Especially on the eve of critical governance discussions that will heavily >> impact the future of python-dev. > > Ironically it's the very gravity of those upcoming discussions that made us > decide to move fast on this. > > Part of why we are in this mess in the first place is due to inadequate > moderation controls available on mailing lists and the way they invite > thundering herds of answers and the combinatorial explosion of posts in trees > of discussion. The PEP 572 process exercised this painfully well. > > Discourse is a chance to address the problems that contributed to the BDFL > stepping down.
Hold on. The group of core developers is rather limited in size. I would understand such a move for e.g. python-ideas, but much less so for the committers list. I'm not opposed to trying Discourse, but don't think the timing is good to fork off discussions to yet another medium. This creates more noise than necessary and diverts discussions away from what we should really be concerned about, namely our model of decision making for PEP discussions which don't come out with a clear direction and a model of how to steer the overarching direction of where Python will go in the coming decades. >> arbitrary decision making > ... >> insufficiently representative group > ... >> without involving most of the people affected > ... > > Hold on. Out of the 30-something committers active in the past two releases, > 20-something were at the sprint. (I can pull more detailed stats but I'm on > the phone now.) Setting up Discourse with the intent of replacing the mailing > lists met no opposition at the sprint. By all counts, the group was > sufficiently representative and involved most of the people affected. Ouch. So those 20 core devs got to decide for whoever else considers themselves a core developer and at the same time fixed the very definition of who is allowed to vote and who is not without asking the complete set of core developers ? The reality is that we're a remote working group, so while in person meetings are nice and can seed new ideas, we do have to take into account that people not present at those meetings do have a stake in Python as core developers as well. > I would prefer for everybody to be there, of course. Some decided against it, > some could not be there even though they wanted to. This is unfortunate. But > if you have committer unanimity in mind, that's not something that was > feasible regardless of the forum. I don't think we're discussing unanimity here, but democratic basics, i.e. who has a stake in Python, who will be heard in discussions and who has voting rights. On the https://discuss.python.org/t/which-list-of-core-developers-is-authoritative/55 posting, you summarize a discussion we've had here on the ML, but leave out parts such as the emeritus discussion (which AFAIR concluded in making this based on whether a core dev wants to switch to that role rather than making this based on PRs and Github activity), it also makes it look like we agreed on just giving "active" core devs voting rights in the governance discussions, which is not the case. This is a typical situation you run into with forum postings. The top posting often receives more attention and is seen as summary of the whole discussion. Unless the top poster updates the posting to reflect the outcome of the discussion below, this can easily to misinterpretations. In email discussions, such summaries are created after the discussions (eg. as PEP), which avoids such misinterpretations. To avoid the same on Discourse, we'd need to have a common understanding to keep the top posting updated to where the discussion is going. Regarding the topic of voting rights: Since we have never really had to vote on anything, the only democratic approach is to give everyone listed as core developer voting rights. Limiting this to an arbitrary definition of "active" is not democratic, since the definition of "active" represents a way to introduce representations, which we can, of course, have, but only after having elected those representatives. -- Marc-Andre Lemburg eGenix.com Professional Python Services directly from the Experts (#1, Sep 29 2018) >>> Python Projects, Coaching and Consulting ... http://www.egenix.com/ >>> Python Database Interfaces ... http://products.egenix.com/ >>> Plone/Zope Database Interfaces ... http://zope.egenix.com/ ________________________________________________________________________ ::: We implement business ideas - efficiently in both time and costs ::: eGenix.com Software, Skills and Services GmbH Pastor-Loeh-Str.48 D-40764 Langenfeld, Germany. CEO Dipl.-Math. Marc-Andre Lemburg Registered at Amtsgericht Duesseldorf: HRB 46611 http://www.egenix.com/company/contact/ http://www.malemburg.com/ _______________________________________________ python-committers mailing list python-committers@python.org https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-committers Code of Conduct: https://www.python.org/psf/codeofconduct/
