Hacker News Reader

Comment by sfn42 | Hacker News Reader

This blog I found seems to support your view https://vorpus.org/blog/why-im-not-collaborating-with-kennet...

> I think a lot of people don't realize how little Reitz actually has to do with Requests development. For many years now, actual maintenance has been done almost exclusively by other volunteers. If you look at the maintainers list on PyPI, you'll see he doesn't have PyPI rights to his own project, because he kept breaking stuff, so the real maintainers insisted on revoking his access. If you clone the Requests git repo, you can run git log requests/ to see a list of every time someone changed the library's source code, either directly or by merging someone else's pull request. The last time Reitz did either was in May 2017, when he made some whitespace cleanups.

This is interesting. I can imagine that going both ways - maybe he feels like he's lost control over the project and that worsens his other reactions?

I think the important thing here is that Kenneth came up with Requests and did the initial implementation beginning in 2011.

The author is referring to Kenneth's involvement in Requests at that time (2019), long after its creation. Substantial work has been done on Requests since he stepped away from the project, but it was born from him.

Oh yeah I don't mean to diminish that part. Rather, I'm thinking this might actually be one of the things he's talking about in the post? Whatever happened that the maintainers took over the repo, that could be a point of tension and maybe a loss of control for him. Which would definitely make you feel like the community was isolating you, right?

Different sides to the story, and neither post here explains exactly what happened with Requests.

I didn't lose control of my project, I removed myself from it intentionally (and unprompted).

gotcha, and I appreciate the info. that sounds less acrimonious than I was imagining definitely

There's an "apology"/response from Keith.

https://kennethreitz.org/essays/2023-01-an_overdue_apology

"i'm sorry, hope we can continue working together in the future" seems like a very mild response to allegedly fumbling 30k, but what do i know...

> the asynchronous landscape within Python's ecosystem failed to meet my expectations, leading me to conclude that Requests should retain its synchronous nature.

i concluded that the ecosystem does things differently than my personal standards, so i'm gonna revert and keep the money. nice.

4 years late and no clarification on what actually happened with the money.

My name is Kenneth, not Keith.

no idea why i wrote the wrong name, sorry about that, Kenneth!

you personally replying to my comment makes me regret the harsh tone of my initial comment, could've just posted your blog post and fairly criticize it instead of taking the gossipy route...

doesn't make it better that i misnamed you and that this is a comment chain below a post of yours venting about your experiences of others treating you differentely. hope you can find more people like Sarah or just a better work environment in general.

Yeah, I’m on mobile, sorry.

You can Google or HN search these past events. In fact, Kenneth lurks on HN, too.

tl;dr (from the linked author):

>In short: He chose a fundraiser structure that avoids standard accountability mechanisms he was familiar with. He never had any plan or capability to deliver what he promised. And when I offered a way for him to do it anyway, he gave me some bafflegab about how expensive it is to write docs. Effectively, his public promises about how he would use the Requests 3 money were lies from start to finish, and he hasn't shown any remorse or even understanding that this is a problem.

A similar (but unrelated) fundraiser mechanism is why I no longer donate to any fundraisers, online (no accountability, no refunds). I'm looking at you µOptics >:-|

Written by Nathaniel Smith, who also got Oliphant out of the NumPy Steering Council? And that linked post was approved by the CoC compliant Python Steering Council, a later version of which canceled and defamed Tim Peters?

Maybe Smith is right on the facts here, but the methods are despicable.

I don't know any of these people, I just thought this blog post seemed credible and painted a very different picture of Reitz than he presents in his own blog.

I do not know the truth, i just thought people might appreciate another perspective.

CoCs suck because the newly empowered people often wield it like a blunt hammer to bludgeon everyone they don't like. They're almost always applied arbitrarily and unfairly. They have the noble goal of equalization but they're really just a co-opting of power by a new in-group.

This blog post is nothing like that. They're not asking you to silence Kenneth, or ignore him, or oust him from anything. They're just laying down the facts. The post isn't even asking you to stop interacting with, it's just a heads-up for anyone who does.

The depth of the politics of the python community is very funny to someone that knows nothing about the community. You are expecting a lot of background knowledge about the opinions of OSS maintainers.

It's kind of like having very strong opinions about the council of yoyo judges and their dramas.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com