Private ballot for voting on promoting a contributor as a core developer?

[vstinner (Victor Stinner)]

@njs

(And AFAICT PEPs 8010, 8011, 8013, and 8014 simply take for granted that we all know what a core dev is, which seems like a recipe for messiness later. Like… a few months ago Pablo got several -1’s but Victor declared that this was good enough, and Guido supported him, so that worked out. But next time we have an ambiguous case like that, then what happens? I’m pretty sure people have genuinely different expectations here – you think that an objection is not a veto, but PEP 8012 says that any -1 is a veto, so I guess Łukasz has a different idea… and we don’t have Guido to resolve things.)

Why do you think that I wanted to formalize the process to promote a contributor? Previously, it wasn’t clear when a vote ends, how many +1 votes vs -1 votes are needed, etc. Sometimes, Guido showed up and said something like “enough, the promotion is accepted”.

In my experience, many votes to promote a contributor were controversial. The “-1 vote means veto” rule was never really applied. If 3 to 5 people support a promotion, but there is a single -1: the -1 is not a veto, the candidate has been promoted anyway. A promotion has been refused when they were 2 to 3 -1 votes, whereas there were 3 or less +1. I didn’t check votes, I’m giving random numbers. My point is that in practice, it’s a more a 2/3 majority (again, this ratio is not exact science ) than “any -1 is a veto”.

IMHO “any -1 vote is a veto” sounds like a great recipe to ensure that no more core dev is promoted… It’s very easy to spot a single mistake of a candidate and exaggerate it to motivate a -1 vote. This is not how I want to promote contributors.

The 2/3 majority of my PEP 8015 is a deliberate choice to get more contributors onboard. As Gregory explained in length, we do have many protections against mistakes, and tooling to fix mistakes (like revert a change). I also became a strong believer of the mentorship church Assigning a mentor before and after a promoting reduces the risk of mistake even more.