Closing and locking a discussion while holding a self-righteous attitude gave me an extremely sour taste in my mouth.
I raised a concern[1] about a bug fix that changed behavior in a stable release when that behavior has been common place for years. Instead of wishing to discuss the thought process about introducing such changes in stable releases I’m greeted with boilerplate followed by a lock of the issue with no reason. I interpreted this as a slap in the face and a “we don’t want your contributions” metaphor. Even if none of that was intended that is how it came across. Instead of locking the issue a simple “hey, lets continue this on the mailing list” would have sufficed and even a “hey, I’m locking this so we can continue in a proper forum” would have been a friendly redirection.
Can we be more considerate in the future? We’re all working towards making Ansible better.
bugfixes change behaviour, always, otherwise they would not be ‘fixing’, that you rely on a buggy behaviour is a different issue than ‘is this really a bug’- before responding to you Sivel check around with other committers to make sure he was not imposing HIS opinion but a broad consensus (most committers do this before responding, unless they already know the consensus)
we have form responses to try to avoid individuals (like me) from communicating in a way that can be considered harsh or impolite. We do add specific comments to the ticket in those forms.
We have 2 community meetings a week, in which we are happy to discuss any issues and hear any extra arguments in the community, specifically to address what some perceive as a bad decision
sivel locked the ticket for your benefit, we don’t see/get notified on closed tickets, so any further discussion is lost (we should actually do this more often as many post to closed tickets and get no answers). You already had an invitation and a link in his response to this forum as a way to continue discussion. I’m unsure what else he should have done.