Ann: let’s create better norms for ensuring all important libraries have several active maintainers

[Carter Schonwald]

I’m very happy that we now agree to have several active comaintainers for
all core/systematically .  (though the specifics of how it was done this
week i view as anthetical to what our community represents and values.)

There’s ways of doing that can be done in a good faith way.  I’m definitely
not perfect.  I also have spent much of the past five years trying to learn
to manage my somewhat aggressive and personal flavor of generalized anxiety
disorder (certain flavors of anxiety or depression in men present as
aggressive behavior ).  Some of my approaches on tickets that people find
frustrating are my attempt to avoid getting fixated on getting into
Interpersonal conflicts rather than trying to shut those voices down. Also
I find it hard to have those dialogues in that communication format.

For asynchronous conversations in different time zones I fully welcome
discord or what’s app or signal or freenode irc.  Conversations with
emotional dimensions are challenging in email.  Let alone with issue
trackers!

In the past month I was working with Simon Jakobi and Andrew lelechenko as
a sort of pilot for a new Haskell action team (HAT) with them as the
initial leadership for 2020, to have some folks we all recognize to have
excellent taste and engineering to help support and triage all maintainers
and efforts. We spent a bit of time helping out on bytestring and I think
that was a success. and I hoping they and other members of  HAT can make a
big difference across all the important libraries we have. I look forward
to support HAT via my role as CLC.

More broadly, I was also privately in discussion with some folks before
this week's tornado about how to move to make it the norm for all core /
important libraries have 3-5 variously active and diversely different
comaintainers. What happened this week is not how id have liked it to be
rolled out, and I’m in the best of head spaces at the moment, but I think
it is VERY good that we collectively agree there should be a norm of
actively making sure there are several diverse co maintainers for every
such library.

how it was handled this week is not how it should have been handled, i pray
that no one ever views this as grounds for similar treatment of people
inour community who have been trying to be in their own way, good
caretakers of important community resources

In terms of what i like and appreciate about this community, I would like
to challenge us all to think about how we can turn frustration into
concrete and positively actionable feedback that supports each other in a
good faith positive way. I feel that we all failed colectively, and thats
fine, but i hope we can learn to engage in this differently.

perhaps most importantly, i think its GENUINELY important to strive to
support and enable every project to have a genuinely diverse maintainer set
for all of our important libraries, both in terms of age, creed and
whatever. Haskell has failed to do a good job of that in the past, and i
challenge us all to work to address that starting with our core going
forward

On Fri, Jun 5, 2020 at 8:32 AM Mathieu Boespflug <m at tweag.io> wrote:

> Zemyla,
>
> I would expect more charitable reception of anything said by anyone, but
> especially when the original author stated clearly in the very same message
> that they are not a native English speaker. And even if the words are to be
> taken on face value, do note that no one has called anyone a tyrant.
> Calling out specific behaviour (that predates the current pandemic) as
> "tyrannous" (or "tyrannical") and naming someone a tyrant is simply not the
> same thing.
>
>
> On Fri, Jun 05, 2020 at 13:06:20, Zemyla <zemyla at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> So you're saying that the fact that there's basically a civil war and
>> pandemic going on is no excuse to respond to e-mails. And you're calling
>> his behavior "tyrannous" when there are literal tyrants shooting tear gas
>> at civilians.
>>
>> I gotta admit, this makes me disinclined to believe you're acting in good
>> faith. Sometimes shit happens to good people, and someone who can't show a
>> little compassion in these (pardon the cliche) unprecedented times is not
>> someone I want anywhere involved in package management.
>>
>>
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