The Perl Foundation is a non-profit that handles grants and conferences (and I'm sad to see their work on the latter has regressed since I helped get a code of conduct in place for american perl conferences close to a decade ago).
It has no authority over core development - that's the Perl Steering Council.
It has no authority over conduct in core development spaces - that's the perl5-porters code of conduct which has its own moderation team attached (of which I am not a member but respect the people who are as effective moderators and also nicer people than I am).
It has no authority over irc.perl.org in general or libera.chat #perl - those are handled by the irc.perl.org code of conduct with a moderation team that I helped recruit after taking the lead on the community consultation part of the code of conduct adoption process, but is far from only me and intentionally includes more than one person who will disagree with me quite vocally on the (sadly more common that I would like) occasions when I fuck up.
What we need to do going forwards is to get conduct enforcement at the TPF/CAT level up to the standard the rest of the community has been reaching for years.
> and the "yes" argument is explicitly racist and empty-headed.
If you are dismissing any possible "yes" argument before it is even made as "racist and empty-headed" I would say that you have withdrawn yourself from public discourse.
Seriously, look in a mirror sometime; read what you've posted as if it were posted by somebody else. Are you excited for the argument that you've prepared for yourself?
The fact that this may or not be true, doesn't matter to him. Nor that he damages the Raku community with this (as well as the Perl community).
However, that this even applies to TPF / the Perl community, is mostly mr. Riedel work, using this trolling for his own agenda (which is reforming The Perl Foundation). The matter has been dealt with within the Raku community already. And Mr. Riedel should know that.
Now, there is that final 10%. Whether the committer knows this or not, he does show some other tendencies that could be considered racist. But in a country like the Netherlands, that is still trying to deal with "Zwarte Piet" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zwarte_Piet) this is sadly not as uncommon as it should be.
Do you have some specific examples and had the Perl community informed him about these?
Not because I necessarily thought he was racist himself (I knew basically nothing about the dude back in ... 2018? I think it was), but because his behaviour was bloody stupid and going to hurt people and cause problems down the line.
He was, unfortunately, unable to understand that my goal was to avoid the "bloody stupid" continuing rather than to accuse him of any particular bigotry, so he got lizmat to force me to revoke the sanctions.
He's now in a far worse position as a result, and the "problems down the line" have, indeed, happened.
Frankly, as a relatively young developer, full of testosterone and even shorter on wisdom than I am, he deserved better friends.
How were you forced exactly?
Mr. Trout was made aware of the upload by Mr. Spek. An upload that had been superseded within half an hour by another one without the offending (empty) directory. With the original upload marked for removal, but since PAUSE doesn't let you remove modules immediately, it stayed up for a week. And *ANY* module ever uploaded to CPAN, stays on BackPAN for historical purposes. Which I think is a good thing, so we can see what we're talking about.
Mr. Trout, in his self-assumed role of moderator of the then #perl6 channels, kickbanned Mr. Spek without further ado from the #perl6 channels. Even though Mr. Spek was a regular contributor to the Perl 6 project and user of these channels for asking questions and giving answers. In an ironic way very similar to Mr. Trout. Who, by his own admission, has made *MANY* mistakes, yet until then, was *NEVER* banned from anything in the Perl community.
I considered the action of Mr. Spek more as trolling / stupidity / bad habit / young foolishness at the time. And the first offence to my knowledge, by no means grounds for a permaban on the channels as instated by Mr. Trout. I therefore, on behalf of the core team and after conversations with our de-facto BDFL Jonathan Worthington, asked Mr. Trout to raise that ban. Which in the end he reluctantly did. And since then has been interpreted by Mr. Trout as condoning racism.
Sadly, over time, it has become clear to many that Mr. Spek is either too stupid to realize what he's doing with his trolling (saying he is a proponent of free speech and using that), or indeed a racist at some level, or both. The commit in his personal repo (which he makes public as good examples of using dot files) was about using the "master" branch as the default for new git repos, rather than the current git default of "main". With as single comment "Get a job, N*". This was no longer a use of the word as just a word: this was adding context and meaning. For which the Raku CAT team has banned him from public Raku places and revoked all of his commit bits until Jan 1, 2022.
Meanwhile, it looks like Mr. Spek will not change.
As to Mr. Trout: I will no longer interact with Mr. Trout in any way, shape or form. With pain in my heart, I must say that I've given up on the Perl community. And I say this is a recipient of a White Camel award, awarded for services to the Perl *community*.
I'm not the only person who left the Perl community because of Mr. Trout's antics. I guess in the end, only people willing to put up with Mr. Trout, will be left in the Perl community. I sincerely hope they will be happy, as life is too short to be unhappy without good reason.
I banned him for responding to it being pointed out that it was an incredibly stupid upload by explaining it wasn't a problem because the slur in question was "just a word" and anyway, he called his black friends that and they didn't mind.
> Mr. Trout, in his self-assumed role of moderator of the then #perl6 channels
I took responsibility for the perl6 IRC infrastructure with Larry's active approval.
Jonathan Worthington was in no way involved in the unbanning process, only Liz being angry at me in private messages on behalf of her 'friend' until I gave up and lifted the ban.
> permaban on the channels as instated by Mr. Trout
The ban was intended to last while he thought about his mistake and considered whether that was the person he wanted to be going forwards.
I still think he would be in a better place today had he had that opportunity then.
> I'm not the only person who left the Perl community because of Mr. Trout's antics.
On a long enough timeline, anybody with an opinion and a spine will get into personality clashes that result in people leaving.
I know of several that were because of me, some of which I regret. I know of several that were because of you, some of which I hope you regret.
So it goes.
TL;DR; - my modules had been up for adoption for *YEARS* already, but nobody was willing to take over maintenance - you can *NOT* just remove modules from CPAN. You can only schedule them for deletion after a week - during that period, no alarm bells started ringing that modules that had downstream dependencies, were being completely removed - I knew that my modules would always be available on BackPAN, and that it would be just a matter of someone re-uploading them and adjusting the master list. Annoying at best, because it would not be breaking anything that was already in production. - And I still had my own copies, so if anybody would have asked to please upload them again, I would have. Nobody did.
What this showed, is that CPAN has a definite vulnerability in this area: - someone (hopefully the owner) can schedule all modules for removal - if these modules have downstream dependencies, then that's too bad: they will stop working
Now, almost two years later, this vulnerability still exists.
As to the reason of me removing my Perl modules: it signalled my leaving the Perl community for good. Before that, I had still hope that some day, I actually would enjoy being part of the Perl community again.
Should I not have removed my modules like that? Well, I don't know how I could further indicate that I did not have any desire to keep maintaining them. The ADOPT-ME status was clearly not enough.
I'm not sure what you tried with ADOPTME, but transferring first-come permissions to ADOPTME would remove your ability to maintain them and allow anyone to adopt the permissions. Permissions for future uploads are a rather separate concern from the currently indexed latest version of the module that dependency chains rely on. The index does not include distributions on BackPAN, so such distributions are only available via manual intervention.
Could you elaborate what these were? I am curious. (I am talking about things other than the commit and the cpan thing)
As far as the Raku CAT is concerned, he is now serving his "sentence" of being banned, until Jan 1st, 2022. We will see what happens after that. I sincerely hope that the Raku CAT will not have to address any reports about him after that date.
Poor kid deserved better friends.
Mattijsen's idea of friendship helped get him ejected from the raku core team (as to whether his being given an opportunity to reconsider his life choices and maybe start acting like an adult would've helped avoid him ending up suddenly single is a rather more open question).
If thinking that was a bad thing as well as the racist comments makes me toxic in your eyes, then so be it.
There, FTFY.
Excellent article. Why does there have to be a singular "Perl community" and Foundation for it? Usually we get schisms and "Thrice Reformed" vs "New Revelation" groups sprout over differences of opinion that rise to intolerable levels.
Very similar to the "why shouldn't a project be forked" question; i get the feeling that forks are frowned on more severely now than in the past; but I can't see why. Recall Xemacs and ecgs, among others? Forks work or they die without bothering anyone.