Some would receive on-the-spot etc etc. Many (most?) would never get anything. Bullying and discrimination were socially accepted pretty much in all ways of life - they still are in many (most?) of them.
CoCs are an effort to formalise a more respectful approach to relationships. Sadly, formalisation is not necessarily an engine for change: we have had plenty of very hard laws against theft and murder all over the planet, for millennia, and still plenty of people will routinely thieve and murder every single day.
Re:Contributors Leaving Pytest
by notacoward on Saturday April 11, 2020 @08:43AM
(#22841365)
The problem with "on the spot practical training" is that not everyone gets the same training across cultures or economic groups. This gives some groups a permanent embedded advantage over others, which is the opposite of meritocracy. Ad hoc enforcement only makes this worse. The ad hoc legalese in a code of conduct can bring more consistency to both rules and enforcement, though regrettably many implementations fall short.
You make a good point — I suppose conduct codes are the HR department for mailing lists. I’ve always thought of collaborative open source communities as groups of friends or at least like minded hobbyists with a common thread of likeability, but I suppose they are a lot more like workplaces.
Re:Contributors Leaving Pytest
by jasonpeacock on Saturday April 11, 2020 @11:17AM
(#22842089)
The "good old days" are definitely not as good, nor as old, as you think they are.
For example, it wasn't until 1965 that racial discrimination in voting was prohibited:
https://github.com/pytest-dev/pytest/blob/master/CODE_OF_CON...
I don’t think there’s anything wrong at all with the spirit of such documents, but they seem to normalize a world where bad behavior is regulated by well-intentioned ad hoc legalese.
In the good old days, one would receive on the spot practical training on how to behave by ones parents, friends, older siblings, teachers etc. I suspect my revulsion at reading codes of conducts is part of me being in denial that there are so many more people in the world now, on the internet, who were raised by the social / etiquette equivalent of animals.