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

[Carter Schonwald]

To be clear, I’ve been pretty fried by managing how to balance improving
those core libraries while avoiding needless breakages that hurt past the
current users.  (Not a good mix for anxiety I guess) And I’m very happy to
shift to taking a supporting / contributing role for those who’ve stepped
forward and as of now are current primary maintainers.

More broadly I’m gonna step back / resign from my
other formal leadership responsibilities and Daniel will takeover as clc
 chair.

It’s been a tough year for me, this fall a younger family member was in the
icu for 6 months, and as with everyone else I’ve not handled the global
pandemic stuff in a way that is conducive to effective technical leadership
in our community. This has impacted other folks, which isn’t great.

I look forward to continuing to collab with this community I care about,
and I guess I need to just step back from over committing myself and focus
on taking care of myself.

On Fri, Jun 5, 2020 at 11:54 AM Carter Schonwald <carter.schonwald at gmail.com>
wrote:

> 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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