> And a release manager who has no libmpdec expertise or authority took the side of the "bug" reporter without much thought.

What is this elusive "authority" you keep bringing up?

> Note that I do not go straight into accusing people, especially in uncertain cases.

Neither did Anthony. He observed breakage in his builds and reported it. He noted that the change happened during the beta freeze which is documented to only allow bug fixes:

https://devguide.python.org/devcycle/#beta

Anthony's only fault here was depending on the system libmpdec which you claim is invalid use. As he explained, he did this to mirror behavior of the official Python packages. And it worked for the first three betas. His surprise breakage report wasn't unreasonable, let alone "petulant". Compare with your own responses which to many of us read unnecessarily defensive.

Nobody is challenging your competence. The problem is entirely with the timing and making non-bugfix changes during the beta phase. Bringing up credentials, track records, or listing professional networks doesn't change that.

Finally, while Raymond and Antoine are welcome to voice their opinions on the matter, your change is landing in 3.9.0b4 which I'm about to announce. So we won't be reverting it. In the future let's make sure we stick to the release calendar to avoid similar heat. If we need to bend a rule or two, that's okay, it happens. Making a fellow core developer stamp your change in such case will increase visibility, and is a good practice regardless, required for example in avionics software.