If you had viewed the comment as esoteric, Ram, then you could have politely asked for a more in-depth explanation. To me the explanation seemed clear: the optimizations had not been documented so we could feel free in changing what -O meant without breaking any assumptions people had made. I didn't think about suggesting a doc patch saying as such while still documenting what it currently does until after I explained why the documentation is the way it is.

As for discouraging contributions, please stop and think about how your messages read to newcomers to bugs.python.org. If I had never contributed and stumbled upon this issue thinking it was an easy one to help with and I saw an openly antagonistic message, I would think twice about participating if that was the kind of attitude I might be confronted with.

And then think about how this discourages me from contributing. I took personal time out of my weekend to give you a prompt reply to your issue instead of making you wait until Monday or until someone else happened to reply so you knew the issue was noticed and you didn't start working on a patch that may not get accepted. And in response to me taking the time to respond to your message I get an antagonistic response. How does that in any way inspire me to want to help you out with this issue? And I certainly don't need this documentation change as I know what -O and -OO do, so if my time to try and help someone with an issue I don't directly benefit from leads to me getting grief for my efforts then why should I bother helping anyone unless it also helps me? It's this sort of tone in communication that is unnecessarily hostile towards project maintainers that leads to burnout and long-term contributors such as myself walking away from a project (and I'm not stating this lightly; this is just one instance in a string of incidents like this where I have been treated poorly that has convinced me to take some time off from helping others in my spare time after Python 3.6b1 is released to prevent me from quitting the Python project entirely).

I'm going to remove myself from the nosy list so that I recuse myself from this issue so that my feelings about this whole situation doesn't influence any potential patch review.