Sorry Guido but it’s BDFL — for LIFE! Just kidding and Thanks Guido for all you’ve done for the Python community.
Also it's 'BD'
Maybe he should have pushed harder on his Royal Prerogative to move things forwards
“I'm basically giving myself a permanent vacation from being BDFL”
51–60 of 764 posts
Re: “I'm basically giving myself a permanent vacation from being BDFL”
#52Earlier quoted context omitted.
When you see them, let the mods know via the Contact link in the footer. They don't see everything and update the ones they know about.
It's very often the mods who editorialize (often you can see some reasoning in the comments), so it is definitely not an issue of them not knowing, rather a change of policy.
I'm not sure I follow. They update the ones they are aware of that need changing, and often comment when they do. The existence of mods commenting and changing some titles doesn't imply that they see all of the ones that need changing. I've read comments by them stating outright that they don't see everything.
Have you seen comments made by them that indicate a change in policy other than those mentioned in the guidelines? Has there been a substantive change in the intent of the guidelines as currently written over time?
Re: “I'm basically giving myself a permanent vacation from being BDFL”
#53[deleted]
Re: “I'm basically giving myself a permanent vacation from being BDFL”
#54Earlier quoted context omitted.
But he is still the BDFL, he's just on permanent vacation.
Have you tried reaching software engineers on vacation? “Sorry I’ll be camping on some rock on Mars where I’ll have spotty internet access so....”
Whenever they say that they either mean they only have 2G connection or they somehow managed to get a Gbit satellite phone so they could be online several hours a day from the woods
Re: “I'm basically giving myself a permanent vacation from being BDFL”
#55Open source burnout is real. I'm sure the allure of giving back by creating something useful fades when people constantly criticize your work, especially when you look at the personal and professional sacrifices you're making to produce free software.
Re: “I'm basically giving myself a permanent vacation from being BDFL”
#56Background ("PEP 572 and decision-making in Python"): https://lwn.net/Articles/757713/
> The problem with the C-style of assignments is that it leads to this classic error: if(x = 0) {...} yeah, if you code on 20 years old compilers with no warnings. GCC 4.1 warns about this (with -Wall) and Clang 3.4 warns about this too, without any warning flag.
I think that having strong opinions on how others should be developing software is how communities become toxic like this.
"Shooting yourself in the foot is your fault for not using a linter that detects accidental misuse of assignment!"
Re: “I'm basically giving myself a permanent vacation from being BDFL”
#57He did a good work -- got it where it is now.
But he also had some specific stickups with some features -- like closures for example.
Re: “I'm basically giving myself a permanent vacation from being BDFL”
#58Yikes. Python has become so hugely popular and is used for so many different use cases that I fear the ecosystem is going to really struggle to find consistency and direction without a dictator.
Maybe we'll try something like a triumvirate? As best I can tell there are basically three areas where Python is dominant: web, data science, and academia. A single leader for each of those spheres could form a council where BDFL-level decisions could be made by fiat.
Each community could then form whatever organization they felt necessary to choose who to send to the triumvirate.
As as check on the power of the triumvirate, we could have something like a "Tribune of the Plebs" - a representative elected by open election from the entire community that holds veto authority over changes approved by the triumvirate.
Re: “I'm basically giving myself a permanent vacation from being BDFL”
#59> I don't ever want to have to fight so hard for a PEP and find that so many people despise my decisions. Leading a large open source project must be terrible in this age of constant outrage :-(
On a related note, we've always had the constant outrage, its the internet that allowed it to become more apparent.
Re: “I'm basically giving myself a permanent vacation from being BDFL”
#60Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's PHP and not Python, but every time I read something like this from a major open source figure, I always think of this old PHP mailing list thread: https://bugs.php.net/bug.php?id=50696
That's a good read. I feel like the "customer is always right" mentality does quite a bit of harm to OSS support. Also reminds me of that dev (who I can't seem to search up) who had their email printed as part of a open-source software license in a car manual and would get ridiculous email from people who had car trouble.