On 2026-05-19 at 20:45, Sean Reifschneider wrote: > I doubt this addresses your concerns, but in reviewing the wording > in CONTRIBUTING.md to try to understand where you are coming from, I > made a few changes to clarify that by "comments" I meant "code > comments", and to further state that documentation and translations > are naturally likely to be a mix of human and AI work.
FWIW, while that does improve the picture *slightly*, my communication-related comments were referring more to the "issues" part. To the best of my awareness (which I will immediately admit may not be sufficient), the primary or even exclusive way GitHub provides for someone to *initiate communication with* the maintainers of a project hosted there is by opening an issue - and if you will reject (and therefore, presumably, immediately or even automatically close, with no substantive response) any issue filed in a way that does not comply with the policy outlined, that means that someone who does not find that policy acceptable *has no way of talking to you*, whether to discuss that fact or for any other reason, unless they can identify you and find a way to contact you by some other means. That sort of foreclosing of potential communication, and the associated ossification (through prevention of disagreeing viewpoints) of the "my way or the highway" policy involved, is the thing that gets my blood so heated about such matters. Even addressing that would, as you suspect, indeed not change my overall stance - because (as noted in my previous post) this is just the aspect which gets the most heated emotional reaction from me, not by any means the only one. I find no merit in the positions you appear to be taking on this, or in the arguments you've presented for them, and I think that the very fact of *anyone* attempting to take those positions in an actual real-world software project - other than as parody, i.e., with the intended goal be to show how nonsensical those same positions are - helps fuel the ability of others to make illegitimate arguments in the overall debate. If that *is* your goal here, then you're doing if anything too good a job of concealing it. It really does look as if you're trying to make the positions taken by the "other side" look nonsensical instead, notwithstanding the explicit statement in CONTRIBUTING.md to the contrary - and even if that is in fact not your intent, as I said, I think the fact that anyone is standing where this project appears to stand in that debate helps strengthen bad argument in the debate as a whole. > I will admit I took a focused stance on the wording, expecting that > people would know that there will be exceptions and we can address > them as they arise. That is, whether fortunately or unfortunately, not the default expectation these days. While it may be the default *if no policy is stated*, generally, if someone cares enough about something to express it as a policy statement, if there is no statement about the possibility of exception that is to be treated as a statement in itself. -- The Wanderer The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man. -- George Bernard Shaw
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