We have no decision process for what "the Rust community" considers important enough political issues to take a stance on, and which stance to take
Agree. At any point in time, there are plenty of bad things happening in the world, and by selecting only a small subset to mention in announcements there will necessarily be some bias in the selection. For example, the Rust team chose to speak out against perceived police brutality in the United States, but then why stay silent about police brutality in Kazakhstan or China? Why speak out against war in Ukraine, but stay silent on war in Yemen, Syria, or Ethiopia? In all the cases where the Rust team has made political statements it seems to have been based on the issue most prominent in Western media, not what was actually the worst thing happening in the world at the moment.
If we myopically only look at the technical: Writing code that exhibits undefined behavior is unprofessional. Implying that fellow members of the community are unprofessional enough to make mistakes is insulting. Encouraging people to use Rust is clearly unprofessionally implying that they can't wright correct C/C++. So we seem to have logiced are way to the contradiction "technically speaking Rust is unprofessional". I suggest that this is like "a proof by contradiction", if we start only looking at the technical we end up with a contradiction, therefore Rust is about more than the technical.
But if we broaden our perspective from the exactly technical to include some human aspects there is no contradiction. The entire point of Rust is to make the coding environment safer for people.
A language empowering everyone to build reliable and efficient software.
Where is the line between Technical and Unprofessional?
Correctness of your code? Clearly technical, that is what compiler does.
Quality of error messages? Maybe technical, although it's hard to tell. The computer doesn't care, it's only for humans.
Quality of documentation? Exclusively for humans. But clearly feels appropriate.
How people are treated in our spaces? Clearly important. We have a moderation team for a reason.
How people in our community are employed? We have semiofficial job listings. They feel appropriate.
How people in our community are treated by the government? You would like us not to have a stand on.
How governments treat each other's people? You claim is clearly unprofessional.
That being said, in the ongoing discussions about formalizing big picture decision-making in our community, I would like to see us decide how we make the decision about what is included.
Pain is relative, and even if you have arguments for how one situation is "objectively" worse, I can't agree with derailing any conversation because it's "objectively worse" in other situations.
I am not trying to define it. I am sorry if I somehow showed it like this. I was aliasing "professional" to "technical". "technical" is not hard to be defined, I think. And I think most of Rust community would agree that Release Announcement is technical.
I'm not saying "actually war in Ukraine and police brutality in the US are okay because other people also do bad things." I'm saying "by only making statements about abuses in the West, the Rust core team could be seen as implying that we should only care about bad things when they happen in Western nations."
The issue is not that I think you're disagreeing with the issue, but that trying to raise other issues in the heat of a present one is poor, regardless of their validity.
I doubt we're gonna remove the clearly non-technical "thanks to all contributors" note from the release announcement either, so I don't think "technical" is the line you're gonna convince people of
While my position should be quite evident given my current profile image[1], I think there is a certain value in what @RalfJung suggested. Having a standalone post would make more sense in my opinion. That post can be linked in the release notes (perhaps by a simple "we stand with the people of Ukraine" message). Such a post would allow the relevant people to express their thoughts thoroughly.
With that said, I think the larger question is who decides if, when, and what to post about. Now that we have a Rust Foundation, I believe it would be reasonable to have a recorded vote[2] of the board of directors. I don't think a simple majority should suffice due to the inherently sensitive nature. Perhaps 60% or two-thirds? It should also be clear that the vote is from the individual, not the company they're employed by (if relevant).
Don't message people about their profile images. I've already had two people message me about mine. It's a harmless picture. If you don't like it, ignore it. âŠī¸
The Rust Foundation is not there to change what release notes look like. It is there to support Rust maintainers.
Considering the discussion here I am strongly in favour to keep adding such comments to release notes where it reaches people who object to it.
I emphasize with isolating from news, but arguably there isn't much content in those release notes that isn't already obvious from even the most superficial news.
This has nothing to do with the Rust Foundation. The foundation has its own blog and can make its own statements.
who decides
In this particular case, the idea to add a statement was brought up on the pull-request for the release announcement, and then the idea was briefly discussed between the core team and top-level team leads. We went for a minimal statement that expresses support for all people affected by the war, and used the words "Putin's forces" in the first sentence to not appear to put blame on an entire country and its people. Those who participated in that discussion were all on board with the statement.
Is this discussion public? Given what people (including yourself) have said about the foundation, I agree that's not the best choice. The core team and team leads seems reasonable. I do think there should be a recorded vote with a documented threshold, though.
The Rust project is not exactly a democracy either. It's consensus-driven. That may seem like just another way of saying "a vote which is, eh, unanimous-ish?" but it isn't. If people wish there to be a formal recording of that consensus, sure, and if someone decides to one-off choose to vote as a performance, sure, but we don't actually vote on things. That's not our normal process.
Indeed, arguably the conversation happening in this thread is a lot more like our normal process, for better or worse. /s
The issue of public vs private discussions and decisions is a very delicate one. I can't imagine that the release post would be able to be published in a timely matter if this was made open to public debate.