I think this situation is a little more… complicated. The block evasion event that’s being referenced is about release dates being changed, which the content of the comment was appropriate and raised an issue which should be addressed (incorrect date). And I just want to clarify, the desire to and action of block evasion I don’t agree with; I just also don’t agree with making someone a permanent outcast because they went overboard with efforts in an unhealthy way. And a mediator earlier on (in November-January) in this instance probably would have helped a lot to address the initial disruptive behavior before we ended up here.
To continue the party analogy, the person being blocked may have noticed that someone took an item of theirs, and was trying to let them know that something happened which they should be aware of. But the other person wasn’t interested and continued to tune the person out. Since communication has broken down, we are in a worse situation as a whole.
The person blocking the other person may have been perfectly justified to not listen to the “annoyance” after a previous event. But doesn’t mean that their input can’t be valuable or meaningful later.
Anyway, analogies may help to bring some intuition about a concept, but usually don’t fit 1 to 1; the farther you stretch the analogy, more it falls apart.
I feel like there was a poor job of identifying the expectations initially, and the large amount of freedom given was taken to the extreme. A lot of people got agitated with the source of “noise” and decided to block the noise.
From my prospective, @Sandro is a perfectionist with a high pain-tolerance for tedious reviews. And for him, having a lot of “subjective rules” around contributions caused him to have a lot of cognitive dissonance. And how he dealt with this discrepancy was by trying to create the standards through PR reviews. Is it a healthy way to approach these problems? no. How many people joined in the conversation about his behavior? many. How many tried to address the issue in a constructive way? few. From what I’ve seen from the IRC and other PR events, there was a lot of frustration and people be short with each other; but little resolution in the ways of direction or outcomes. Which is why I think a lot of people understandably blocked him.
I don’t think he ever meant to cause so much disruption, he just wanted nixpkgs to be “perfect”. In an alternate universe there was better guidance given earlier on, and people were really thankful the additional attention he provided to the absolute avalanche of PRs and issues that nixpkgs has.
I did. Twice. But I can only come from my experiences. And address the issues which I perceive as problematic. My experiences with him are mostly from hundreds of python PR reviews, and things are less ambiguous for expectations as python packaging is already highly opinionated in most regards; so his comments were mostly aligned with what I or fridh would say in a review. Most people that took extreme issue with his mannerisms, ignored him or escalated the situation.
EDIT: Apparently I don’t finish sentences