January Steering Council update

I’ve just published the January steering council update, also included below:

2022-01-03

  • The SC met with Łukasz & Ee and discussed:

    • How to choose PRs to work on
    • Bot reliability
    • Increasing quota for Discourse
    • GitHub issue migration
  • The SC discussed project management for the GitHub issue migration. (The Developer-in-Residence can look into it, but that means there’ll be less time for other duties.)

  • The SC discussed its lack of diversity, Diversity & Inclusion, and how it can represent the interests of the entire community.

  • The SC discussed how to handle PEP 659 (Specializing Adaptive Interpreter) and how to handle similar informational PEPs in general.

  • The SC discussed getting Petr and Greg up to speed.

2022-01-10

  • The Steering Council discussed the GitHub Issues migration, and has asked the Developer-in-Residence to take on some of the work for it.
  • The SC discussed PEP 646, which was changed since the previous SC accepted it. Petr will send out a couple of questions about it.
  • The SC discussed PEP 620, Eric Snow’s draft PEP on isolated subinterpreters, and how to handle such big overarching plans in general. The SC will start by creating a clearer guideline for when a PEP is required.

2022-01-17

  • The Steering Council discussed the GitHub Issues migration with the Developer-in-Residence and got some status updates. Some issues and expectations were discussed and clarified.
  • The SC discussed PEP 646 and decided that it should be accepted.
  • The SC discussed PEP 673 and decided that it should be accepted.
  • The SC started to discuss PEP 638 and after some initial considerations it was decided that the discussion will continue in the next meeting.
  • The SC decided that it would be a good idea to schedule a review of open PEPs at some near point in the future.
  • The SC discussed the possibility of doing a PyCon US keynote. Petr and Brett said that they won’t attend and the group decided that it was ok if Thomas, Greg and Pablo do it. It was decided that we should get questions online and on stage. Thomas will talk with Jackie to start organizing it.

2022-01-24

  • Met with Loren from the PSF.
  • Accepted PEP 673 (Self type).
  • Barry approved as the PEP delegate for PEP 676 (PEP Infrastructure Process).
  • Discussed PEP 670 (Convert macros to functions in the Python C API).

2022-01-31

  • The SC met with Łukasz & Ee and discussed:

    • GH issue migration
    • CLA bot
    • Freezing the main branch while buildbots stabilize
    • Looking for a release manager for 3.12
  • The SC discussed if freezing the main branch was OK, and unanimously agreed that it was.

  • The SC discussed PEP 677 (Callable Type Syntax) and PEP 670 (Convert macros to functions in the Python C API) and decided to try drafting replies asynchronously.

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Is it in order to request for more detail on what was discussed or resolved on this?

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You can do that in the SC tracker. But I can reply as myself, based on my own memory, interpretation of the discussion, and later thoughts:

Unfortunately, the current SC is five white guys. That’s bad. I don’t like that. But there is not much the current SC can do with the situation. The way the election process is set up, it favors core developers, especially well-established ones, and that doesn’t give us diverse results. But we have no good ideas how to make it better, and ultimately it is up to the voters, not the SC, to change the election process.

As the SC, we can strive to live up to our mandate and “make contributing as accessible, inclusive, and sustainable as possible”. We can also make sure we take underrepresented and quieter voices into account in our decisions. I try, and I hope everyone else on the SC does as well.
We should also actively look for ways to make things better – but the SC is usually overbooked with technical issues. (BTW, the January diversity & inclusion discussion happened when a member of the SC was absent and we didn’t want to discuss PEPs.)

If you have ideas about how to make things better, feel free to let me know (in public or privately) and I’ll think about how to push this issue forward.
And it should go without saying that the SC should be held to a much higher standard than most people. If anything is off, don’t hesitate to contact conduct-wg@python.org and complain about our behavior.

Thank you very much for your question! Keep 'em coming :‍)

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