The reason I’m asking this is @vstinner at one point listed both @tiran and @Senthil in PEP 8100 because they both wanted to nominate him. In PEP 8100 that made it look like Victor had extra support compared to everyone else. I figured we should probably discuss whether my gut feeling on this is wrong or whether we want to standardize this for the PEP somehow.
Now I don’t want to discourage Victor or anyone else from listing people who support their nomination, but I also don’t know if we want to have nominees trying to collect nominators to make their entry in PEP 8100 look better compared to others (and I’m not accusing Victor of trying to do this, BTW; his entry just made me think of this scenario).
So what do people think?
List as many nominators as one wants
Core devs can list a specific nominator
Core devs list self, externals list a core dev nominator
Only list a nominator in the case of an external nominee
Yea, I agree with @pitrou. I don’t think it’s relevant who nominated someone (and if it is, the longer description someone writes on discord or wherever can contain that information).
In the case of Victor’s nomination, I added @Senthil shortly I created Victor’s nomination. Senthil asked me to list his nomination, too. There are other cases, e.g. @ambv’s nomination has Brett and Guido as nominators. I know that @ncoghlan and I both asked another person on the same day.
I don’t see any harm to have one or two nominators listed, but not more than two. The nominator list shouldn’t turn into a pre-election.
I’m the one who put a space for nominator in PEP 8100 in the first place, so I can explain the motivation anyway. I was just thinking that since the qualification for being listed there is “has been nominated”, it made sense to provide some evidence/audit trail kind of information. It wasn’t intended as a show of support or anything.
Maybe it should be replaced by a link to the post where someone was nominated? That seems like it would be more useful to the average reader and be a better audit log, while removing the popularity contest effect.
Listing a single nominator is fine I think, but certainly not a whole list. We can’t reliably track this through posts (some of which have already been modified to have different owners), and it’s quite common to list a “mover” and a “second” in meeting minutes. (If we required seconding then I’d say list both, but as a single nomination is enough then let’s stop at one.)
I want to second this. My choice to nominate someone wasn’t an endorsement of them. Rather, I wanted to give them a chance to run. (I’m declining to say who I support or will vote for.)
It also seems to be missing the option, “List one nominator for each candidate.” Or is that what “Core devs can list a specific nominator” means? But if that’s the case, it should say “Both core devs and externals can list a specific nominator.”
That’s what it’s supposed to mean, but I can’t edit the poll now because more than 5 minutes have passed and Discourse won’t let you tamper with what people have been voting on.
Technically, I think a link to the commit adding the person’s name to the PEP would be a better audit log, because that’s the step that needs to happen for someone to be nominated (and you can see which core developer did the nomination, and unlike Discourse it’s immutable). But I think a link to the discussion topic when present is useful for other reasons – because it’s a place to learn information about that candidate.
People in general seem to think the listing of the nominator(s) is unnecessary and potentially be misconstrued as an endorsement, and so I went ahead and stripped the nominators as we can rely on the git log if we need to audit who nominated someone.