[Python-Dev] Goodbye (original) (raw)

Benjamin Peterson benjamin at python.org
Wed Sep 22 17:06:06 CEST 2010

2010/9/22 Guido van Rossum <guido at python.org>:

On Wed, Sep 22, 2010 at 4:07 AM, Nick Coghlan <ncoghlan at gmail.com> wrote:

A number of lingering issues that would have otherwise continued lingering did indeed get closed. That work is still appreciated, even if it was ultimately deemed by the other tracker admins not to be sufficient to balance out the hassles created by his aggressive stance towards closing older issues (which, while unloved, are not automatically invalid). How and how often was Mark reminded about this?

I believe that mailing list thread was the main thrust. However, many issues which he closed were reopened with a message saying why they shouldn't be closed.

If this had happened without the prior discussion regarding more appropriate handling of tracker issues, then I would have an issue with it. However, given that the first reaction was to provide additional mentoring, with revocation of privileges only happening when the problems continued, that seems to me like the way this process is meant to work. Where was the decision to revoke privileges discussed? Not on any mailing list that I am subscribed to. Was Mark given an ultimatum?

Indeed, it was on IRC.

Given that this came out rather unfortunately (even if the end result is the best that could have happened) I would recommend that in the future more attention is paid to "documenting" publicly that someone's being booted out was inevitable, by an exchange of messages on python-dev (or python-committers if we want to limit distribution). And no, I don't think that IRC (where I suspect this happened) is sufficient.

We'll note that for the future.

-- Regards, Benjamin

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