This is not kindergarten. James has a name and you could bring this up with him personally rather than stabbing him in the back posting this here.
James has done an incredible amount for the Django & Python world through both his code and his writing and is someone I have looked up to since starting with Django back in 2008. Posting this year old pull request out of context with those insinuations leaves me disgusted to be quite honest, that attitude is not welcome in the Python community.
For a major patch that may affect a project for a long time going forward, I can understand the maintainer being strict about what gets applied, and wanting to have more code quality control.
This patch is miniscule. He should have applied it and moved on.
Anonymous cowards launching personal attacks years down the line on account of trivial decisions like not merging a particular patch doesn't hurt OSS?
Should we stand by and encourage people to blast Alan Cox for every patch that wasn't included in Linux that someone wanted in there? Does that help OSS?
Yes, it was a trivial decision and looks like that decision was not taken, so people expected that to happen sometime: "Well, I've said multiple times that I'll be working on this during the PyCon sprints".
More than that, the closing message: 'Closing, rejected, due to use of "approval" as spam.'
Yes, it is up to the maintainer to do that. How he do that matters.
Ok maybe the guy was wrong, but putting him on a pedestal like this is not fair to him. He has no tools to fight back public shaming. A fair fight would have been a better fork. Also, that's kinda the point of open source. For many of us developers ego massaging is the reward for contributing free work. It can certainly be a bad thing. But let's not kid ourselves that we would absolutely behave differently if put in a similar position. Even the best of us falter.
Maybe people who still hold a grudge over a year later should get off their asses and take some responsibility for the fork instead? If James is so awful, and django-registration needs to be updated so badly, then why aren't we hearing about the armies of people who've taken up James's offer to take over django-registration?
Hey you know I did my last (happens to also be my first) OSS in 2002. The abuse I got for my efforts was insane. This is just another example that fits right into my (personal, for sure) view of the community as a whole. I also understand that bad news travels, and good news is just the status quo so you don't hear about it. Such is life.
James has done an incredible amount for the Django & Python world through both his code and his writing and is someone I have looked up to since starting with Django back in 2008. Posting this year old pull request out of context with those insinuations leaves me disgusted to be quite honest, that attitude is not welcome in the Python community.