CoC-compatible Community Builds

First, we didn’t publicise this decision, we didn’t hide it, but we also weren’t exactly tweeting about it – we just dropped a few lines from a repo that we maintain.

Second, the analogy is very apt: maintaining the community build involves asking people to make changes to their code/build definition when they break the build. These interactions with this particular group of people often turned vitriolic on the slightest disagreement (as you can see in this thread).

14 Likes

Person? Sure. Project?

Are we seriously saying that the entire scalaz contribution network is not worth working with? Hundreds of people and thousands of users?

This isn’t as easy as just hanging up on someone. This is much, much greater in scope.

3 Likes

You’re blowing this out of proportion. The community build is nice and very valuable, but we receive and fix plenty of bugs discovered outside of the community build.

7 Likes

How is this out of proportion? You’ve excluded a massive community from a valuable tool.

How is that helpful for scala?

Your other contributions are of course welcomed but im not really sure what that has to do with this conversation. The thread concerns decisions for this tool.

Everyone’s explained it already. It was more of a “Enough’s enough” situation with the team.

I would hope that, in this hypothetical, when the people at the company with which you do have positive, or even neutral, relationships ask for clarification, they wouldn’t be shutdown the way the reinstatement request PR was.

Then why mention CoC violations without being willing to actually back up that accusation? It’d be a very different situation if the commit message had been along the lines of, “Removing projects due to private considerations.”

Instead, the commit message entered a vague accusation of toxicity into the public record which the Scalaz and ZIO folks have little recourse to address.

Even with the clarification in this thread, all we know is that its some subset of those projects were behaving badly. We don’t know who (so we can avoid them), what (so we have a clear idea of the bounds of acceptable behavior), or when (is this a continuation of historical bad blood, or recent misbehavior).

That ambiguity is not good for anyone.

7 Likes

@morgen-peschke you’re probably right, but now it is no longer ambiguous:

2 Likes

Yes, 64 messages into this thread. It dropped while I was writing my last message, and my browser didn’t refresh the post.

Honestly, if this had been in the PR, this thread probably wouldn’t exist.

I’ll add that the Scalaz group has an easy way to remedy the present situation:

  • They can fork the community build (it’s pretty amazing tech) and run it themselves, or
  • They can add a compatible code of conduct.

For that reason, it doesn’t seem prejudicial to have dropped Scalaz from the community build.

The community build have finite resources, and recompiling Scalaz 7.2 again and again has limited returns on investment, and dropping Scalaz 8 or ZIO in the face of the code of conduct issue when there is minimal adoption for either is also the community build’s prerogative.

8 Likes

@morgen-peschke I understand what you are saying, but i also understand why they would not want to say anything about it. They don’t want to get attacked by anyone on the scalaz team :joy: and instead it all backfired bringing in random people like me wanting to get it sorted :sunny:

3 Likes

I like those suggestions - especially the second one.

Another is if they designate a particular maintainer, that has a history of curteous behavior, to act as a liason with the Community Build so @adriaanm doesn’t have to interact with the ones who are causing the problems.

A code of conduct would be better in the long run, but it might not be feasible in the short term.

3 Likes

Let us take into account that resources always limited. If a project exceeds the budget it will just close. Will it be helpful?

It is absolutely enough being less effective to get out the budget.

And if that had been the stated reason, there might have been a technical discussion, but that’s about it.

Referencing the CoC is looking more and more like a middle-of-the-road compromise between saying nothing at all (which might have worked), and calling out people with a history of throwing loud tantrums. Understandable, but it looks to have backfired somewhat.

1 Like

I’m willing to accept that perhaps Adriaan and Seth did this because they believed they could not speak to the authors due to past interactions. I, in particular, saw the dishonesty and lack of forthcoming at the top of thread to be a confirmation that the situation was, in fact, just as I saw it initially. I am now of the opinion that it was perhaps a two-fold inability to communicate the rationale, as well as defensive behavior when called on the hand-wavy answers given. I can take this lack of communication for what it’s worth. If you can accept what it looks like for us, I can accept what it looks like for you, and we can move on.

I’ll be the first one to say it: sorry. I am particularly frustrated with this response because I have been working in Haskell and only get dragged back into what amounts to be highschool drama. To see that a new bastadardization of the CoC (as @djspiewak described it “people who get along with Seth”) has appeared is especially disheartening. But again, not my fight. I have repeatedly asked in this thread for @adriaanm and @SethTisue to provide a way forward. Can you do that now for us so that we can stop this back and forth? If you have experienced any misbehavior recently, bring it to John and I and we will sort it out. This needs to stop.

You can find me on Twitter.

13 Likes

Clearly not. But there should be common ground here. It isn’t black and white. We should be able to come together to improve the scala ecosystem. This does not accomplish that.

Also the reason provided wasn’t that this is too much work, rather an issue with dealing with the scalaz maintainers in general. This decision isn’t technical or financial, and that’s what bothers me the most.

2 Likes

Exactly, as @onesupercoder puts it. Perhaps if there had been greater clarification from the beginning, those of us who aren’t in the know in terms of the politics of it all wouldn’t have been concerned enough to jump on this thread - coupled with earlier comments along the vein of “first time posters keep off” of course.

Most people concerned enough to comment are stakeholders in some way or another. And whilst project maintainers don’t need to “answer” to anyone, transparency is essential in promoting a healthy community ecosystem.

2 Likes

As I read through this topic, I had many of the same thoughts.

I think there have been regrettable actions and comments on both sides of this issue, and the discussion has left the core of the matter and entered emotional appeals.

I find the extreme exaggeration of the original change most obnoxious. People have claimed that scalaz was “removed from the community”. This is laughable. It was removed from the community build. The difference between those two statements is staggering. But some seem bent on equivocating.

I think the original commit message sounds suspicious. It probably should have just been “Removing some projects that are more difficult to maintain than I find worth it.” Then we wouldn’t be here.

8 Likes

No one dragged you into this! You started this thread, with dubious motives to say the least.

7 Likes

You can be dragged in in more than one way. People post this stuff all over and of course I’m going to get dragged in as a Scalaz maintainer.

Dubious Motives

Really? My entire post history here has been trying to get you to tell the truth about why that commit happened, and it’s been like pulling teeth. I just offered to say “well, this may have been a breakdown in communication” and took the opportunity to deescalate, and here you are, escalating. What outcome do you want?

10 Likes

So sad to see another one drama which split Scala community one more time. When we start to unite people, but not split? A lot of people already left Scala due to that unrelated to the language dramas.

Can someone just do a survey and find out what most people think?

3 Likes