Re: [Ksummit-discuss] [PATCH v2 0/3] code of conduct fixes

From: Eric W. Biederman
Date: Wed Oct 10 2018 - 19:23:52 EST


James Bottomley <James.Bottomley@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> writes:

> Resend to show accumulated tags and also to add a third patch listing
> the TAB as the reporting point as a few people seem to want. If it
> gets the same level of support, I'll send it in with the other two.


There is also:

> Our Responsibilities
> ====================
>
> Maintainers are responsible for clarifying the standards of acceptable behavior
> and are expected to take appropriate and fair corrective action in response to
> any instances of unacceptable behavior.
>
> Maintainers have the right and responsibility to remove, edit, or reject
> comments, commits, code, wiki edits, issues, and other contributions that are
> not aligned to this Code of Conduct, or to ban temporarily or permanently any
> contributor for other behaviors that they deem inappropriate, threatening,
> offensive, or harmful.

Which is very problematic.
a) In append only logs like git we can not edit history.
Making it a mainters responsibility to edit the history, to do the
impossible is a problem.

b) There are no responsibilities of for people who are not Maintainers.
That is another problem.

c) The entire tone of the reponsibilities section is out of line with a
community where there are no enforcement powers only the power to
accept or not accept a patch. Only the power to persuade not to
enforce.

Overall in the discussions I have heard people talking about persuading,
educating, and not feeding trolls. Nowhere have I heard people talking
about policing the community which I understand that responsiblity
section to be talking about.

Increasingly I am getting the feeling that this document does not the
linux development community. Perhaps a revert and trying to come up
with better language from scratch would be better.

I don't know how to rephrase that reponsibility section but if we don't
go with the revert something looks like it need sot be done there.

Eric