[zahlman]

> The whole issue around... Peters really shows how difficult it is dealing with certain types of people.

It really isn't. You just have to:

1. Actually have a reasonable course of action. (Peters censored the offensive word, after all.)

2. Be prepared to explain it. (Nobody, to my knowledge, has yet given a clear, concrete argument as to why anything Peters said should actually be taken as offensive in principle.)

3. Communicate directly and specifically. That is: say that specific phrasing in a specific post (or discussing a specific topic in a specific post, etc.) was problematic, and why you believe it to be so.

It seems to me like some people don't think this is a reasonable standard to expect from policy enforcers. I'm baffled as to why that is.

Honestly, I find that Peters goes above and beyond in social graces, for a community of programmers, on average. He has repeatedly shown that he's willing both to edit his posts in response to such feedback (for example, as happened with the OP and title of the "How can we better support neurodivergent newcomers to the community?" thread (https://discuss.python.org/t/_/58724) and to preempt issues by offering praise before criticism, soften tone etc. It seems that he can easily write things that start out like "Good idea! But I have some small concerns about X..." in a situation where it would take my entire wherewithal for the day to resist just starting off with the X part.

> I don’t fault the PSF here, the rule changes were overwhelming accepted.

This happened after the conclusion to the discussion. A discussion in which several key questions posed to the PSF Board were left unanswered, along with a heavy dose of deliberate glomarization (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glomar_response).

It makes no sense to fault someone for not knowing that the change would be accepted. But also, 81% is a low score for these kinds of ballot measures. Normally, essentially nobody has any real reason to oppose any of them. The other ones saw much stronger acceptance. A result like this should warn those in charge that the trust thermocline is within field of view.

> There are people and we all know a couple, who will just argue asinine points to the point that you realise it’s all just a game to them.

Agreed. For example, Peters had to deal with several of them in the "Inclusive communications expectations in Python spaces" thread (https://discuss.python.org/t/_/57950), and then got written up for making too many posts in that thread (based on a subjective standard that isn't anywhere in the Code of Conduct, nor reasonably inferrable from the Code of Conduct, and which was only publicized ex post facto in https://discuss.python.org/t/_/58666) because it was necessary in order to respond to everyone who was bothering him with such. However, it seems that he either doesn't reach such a point of realization, or doesn't have a proper exit strategy for such situations. Granted, it's much harder when it isn't one-on-one.

> It’s a shame to lose people with the technical knowledge and experience, but sometimes they are just too disruptive and refuse to acknowledge it.

Hopefully, Thomas Wouters et. al. will learn this lesson in the next Steering Council election. (The Code of Conduct Work Group, for whatever reason, isn't elected and gets to appoint its own replacements.)

[VagabundoP]

If far more fundamental that that. Its that he went to bat for a module called slut and then tried to justify it using sophistry and pedantry.

There's a huge generational gap here I'm sure but I don't find it acceptable to have that discussion in 2024. There's enough people that will be upset by a module called slut for me to not raise an eyebrow about its deletion without a big hoo-ha.

The package can be renamed and re-loaded if its worth it to the author.

Peter's in creating the thread just shows how out of touch he is, and how he

[zahlman]

>he went to bat for a module called slut and then tried to justify it using sophistry and pedantry.

No, nothing of the sort actually happened. Rather, he mentioned the fact that he had voted to leave it alone ten years ago, and that this was one of the few split decisions he could recall from his tenure as a board member. And the vote was 6-4 with 1 abstention, so it's not as if he represented a radical fringe position.

Nothing he said was to argue that the module should have been left alone or that it would be correct to do so today, and what little he said about his recollection of his 10-year-old memory could not plausibly be called sophistic or pedantic.

And, again, he censored the word. It's one thing to get upset seeing objectionable words in plaintext when reading the Python Discourse forum (or HN, for that matter). It's quite another to get upset by the fact that someone else is talking about something in a context where you can tell that it involves objectionable words somehow. Sometimes those discussions need to take place, because otherwise you don't actually form objectionable-word policies.

Finally: the PSF gets hosting for PyPI provided by Fastly - it would be prohibitively expensive at market rates. (By my back of the envelope calculations, it would cost a few times the entire on-the-books revenue of the PSF to pay for the downloads, if they had to pay AWS or a similar service.) Shouldn't they be the ones who get to decide what content is appropriate on their servers? (I certainly hope you aren't trying to say that people shouldn't be allowed to name their packages what they want to begin with, even if they're only distributed privately.)