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

Guido van Rossum guido at python.org
Wed Sep 22 17:44:12 CEST 2010

On Wed, Sep 22, 2010 at 8:29 AM, Stephen J. Turnbull <stephen at xemacs.org> wrote:

Guido van Rossum writes:

 > 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. +1 on explaining "what" and "why" where the committers can see it, and +1 on limiting distribution.

Agreed on both counts.

The one time I lifted someone's privileges that's the way I did it (by luck, mostly).  In hindsight, the fact that it was all done in plain sight of the committers made it easy for us to put the incident behind us.  The fact that it was only visible to the committers made it easier mend the relationship later.

I understand the desire to keep dirty laundry in. I would like to keep it in too. Unfortunately the offending person in this case chose not to; I will not speculate about his motivation. This is not unusual; I can recall several incidents over the past few years (all completely different in every detail of course) where someone blew up publicly and there wasn't much of a chance to keep the incident under wraps. I see it as the risk of doing business in public -- which to me still beats the risk of doing business in back rooms many times over.

-- --Guido van Rossum (python.org/~guido)

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