Is there a way to punish a contributor / committer for a mistake?

[doronbehar]

Say I encountered a PR that added some code that there is a consensus is wrong - either according to the Nixpkgs manual, or pkgs/README.md. Or for example someone marked a package as broken and didn’t write a comment or in the commit message explaining why.

And say I encountered the above change after a while, and I write a comment in the PR, and the author of the offending commit ignores my comment and doesn’t fix the issues they have presented.

It may also be that the author of the PR didn’t merge the wrong commit, but some committer merged it, and they too don’t respond to comments about their mistake, and they don’t make an effort to fix the mistake.

This behavior is severe IMO, and I think that such a committer should be punished somehow. What do you think?

[arianvp]

I would suggest contacting one of the moderators and explaining the situation.

They can talk with the contributor about their behaviour. And come to an agreement or way forward and help remediate the conflict.

In the past we’ve removed commit bits, or even temporarily banned people from the GitHub org, for misbehaving in the way you describe.

[jakehamilton]

To clarify, your problem is with someone not responding to comments on a PR after it is merged?

[Aleksanaa]

Constitutional Assembly: Interim Nixpkgs committer delegation team

To ensure the continued delegation of Nixpkgs commit access, we’re appointing a new interim team: @Mic92 @NickCao @jtojnar This team is given the responsibility and authority of changing the list of Nixpkgs committers. We’re letting this team define their own process, with some basic requirements: The process must be publicly documented, the initial process is documented here Any change to the process must be unanimously agreed upon by all delegation team members Furthermore we give the …

If I understand the content of this resolution correctly, the committer delegation team is responsible for “changing” the committer list. So complaints about committers’ lack of technical and communication skills should be resolved by them, and decide whether to remove problematic committers. Of course, reports of their words and deeds not being in compliance with the CoC should still be handled by the moderation team.

[pbsds]

I personally prefer to first communicate with the contributor before escalating, but I understand that some fear retribution. We really should provide some anonymous means of reporting poor conduct.

[doronbehar]

@arianvp

I would suggest contacting one of the moderators and explaining the situation.

After discussion with one of the moderators, I was convinced that this is out of their domain, as this is not an inappropriate behavior on a personal level, but rather on a professional level, and hence this is the domain of the governance team.

@pbsds

I personally prefer to first communicate with the contributor before escalating,

The whole point of my complaint is the lack of communication, much more then I’m bothered by the mistake itself.

@Aleksanaa

If I understand the content of this resolution correctly, the committer delegation team is responsible for “changing” the committer list. So complaints about committers’ lack of technical and communication skills should be resolved by them, and decide whether to remove problematic committers.

Indeed that is correct, Thanks:).

[Tmplt]

What channel is appropriate for this? Do I CC a group publicly in the PR or contact them on Matrix/email?

[doronbehar]

I think it should be a PR just like any other PR (I’ve seen such PRs in the past). However there is no official “governance” team so it seems, so you’d have to hope someone confident enough to approve such a PR would stumble upon it. Perhaps linking the PR in this thread might be a good idea as people hear have shown that they care enough about such experiences so they might be able to review such a PR.