[zeromq-dev] CZMQ community & red cards

[Pieter Hintjens]

Hi all,

I'd like to get feedback on a thread[1] regarding what I consider to
be unacceptable behavior from a CZMQ contributor.

There are many people here who use CZMQ and depend on it, and this
thread is therefore relevant to you.

My observation is that the contributor in question has tried to make
large changes to CZMQ, driven by his use cases. So far, so good.

However these changes added considerable complexity, and in some cases
broke the existing APIs. The patches also ignored our coding style
guidelines, despite repeated requests to confirm. We eventually made
an automatic reformatter, which seems a sad solution to large and
messy patches.

CZMQ, like libzmq, is driven by small, incremental changes. The large
shifts that we got from @mrvn were difficult to deal with, poorly
argued (IMO) and inconsistent with our process, which demands small,
focused answers to agreed problems.

We now find ourselves in sniping. I don't have time or energy for
this, given this contributor's history of "patch by argument".

Two things I've done, therefore. One, our C4.1 process now offers
project maintainers the option of banning troublesome contributors.
Two, I've told @mrvn that he will be banned if he continues creating
what I consider "trouble".

Please weigh in with your constructive opinions on this.

-Pieter