Withdraw most of my ownership in favor of Mark | Hacker News Reader

Withdraw most of my ownership in favor of Mark

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71 pointsmadmax10818 comments

This is a misleading headline; he's removed himself from the some of the CODEOWNERS file entries on Github (he's still on asyncio), which governs whose signoff you need to merge a PR. It's not even clear this is really news.

No aspect of the actual "ownership" of Python's code has changed.

Does it at least mark the end of an era? Even if it doesn’t have any legal meaning, it could still mark a significant milestone — especially if you look at the future of the language. It’s now in the hands of the next generation of maintainers (at least as far as PRs go).

But as others have said - I’m not sure what this really changes.

That would have been his 12 July, 2018 announcement.

(Submitted title was "Guido van Rossum drops ownership of the core Python interpreter code". We've reverted it now.)

He stepped away from being the 'BDFL' back in 2018[1] so yeah, this isn't really news worthy.

[1] https://www.mail-archive.com/python-committers@python.org/ms...

This seems to be about GitHub’s annoying CODEOWNERS feature where every matching user in the CODEOWNERS file is forcefully added as a reviewer of opened PRs.

To my knowledge this “feature” can’t be toggled independently and in my experience often drastically reduces the signal-to-noise ratio of GitHub notifications for people in a CODEOWNERS file.

I wish GitHub allowed this to be configured. You either get this functionality and enforced code owner approval, or neither.

It's absolutely horrific. It has resulted in me not looking at my notifications ever again, and people have to ping me on Slack to get a review.

I also don't understand why I get notifications about PRs that I myself closed or merged.

This is the last of his “George Washington” moments - a peaceful handover of power with barely any fuss.

Over the twenty something years I have been watching python development, there has always been ”grownups in the room” - reasonable people making the best decisions they can manage. (Not always perfect, not always calm and without incident but overall, solid.

Python really has been an exemplar on how to manage an open project, and this marks a multi year long process of peaceful handover of power.

Nice one Guido.

The community is generally pleasant to deal with but their engineering decisions have often been bad. The 2-3 transition is the biggest glaring example of a misstep. Even after that fiasco, they have continued to make breaking changes to the language even within the 3.x series. Don't get me wrong, it's usable and probably the best scripting language overall (mostly because of its popularity). But it could have been much better.

You say "exemplar", as if the 10 year long 2 to 3 upgrade which almost killed the language didn't happen... if it wasn't for the massive userbase of data scientists and academics which kept using it no matter what, python would have gone the way of perl

Can somebody explain what Guido van Rossum has been doing from a day to day perspective on core Python since he stepped down from BDFL? I’m asking in good faith as I don’t follow Python that closely and am curious what he has done since 2018.

https://devblogs.microsoft.com/python/python-311-faster-cpyt...

I’ve seen him discuss additions to the static typing features.

He pushed for this operator :=

And switch/case pattern matching

And he merged Microsoft's faster bytecode for arithmetic operators.

> I'm tired of not knowing whether I am actually asked for a review, so I'm withdrawing my "ownership" from the core interpreter

I am out of the loop on Python development, what do he means here?

I'm just interpreting the context (guessing) but it sounds like his presence in the CODEOWNERS file means that he's being added to PRs automatically, and without people clearly asking for or wanting his input on them specifically. And perhaps without waiting for his input before merging. So he may want to be tagged on PRs only if people deliberately want his input, rather than by default.

It means Github won't ping him for every pull request.

... and merge without Mark's review. :D

Imagine you wake up one day, and see that you get a bunch of code review requests 'cause the old maintainer simply said "This guy is the owner of this now".

(I'm pretty sure Mark is fine with this, and Guido already explained the situation to him, but kinda funny, nonetheless.)

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