It is super muddled, yeah. It was initially about deciding between manylinux2014 or perennial, but 233 messages later it’s pretty impenetrable. And I saw @pradyunsg’s suggestion of using discourse’s moderation features to split off the C++ debugging into a new thread, and I think it’s a good idea and I have the permissions to do that… but I can’t actually figure out how to do it at this point.
Yeah, this is definitely a good idea. I’ll do that.
As far as I can tell, the PEP does explicitly address every point that’s been raised.
I’m sure there are things I could have done to explain my points more clearly. I’ve tried not to get frustrated I haven’t always succeeded, and I apologize to everyone for that. But if these are your criteria then I’m at a loss about how we can move this forward. Distributing portable binaries is a hugely complex topic and it involves a ton of super niche technical details and there’s a ton of misinformation floating around out there on the net. Even folks like you who are experts in packaging in general are mostly unfamiliar with the specific issues here. So it’s always going to be difficult to get a clear and unambiguous consensus. And that puts you in the really difficult position of having to somehow make a decision when you don’t have the time to really become an expert on the issues, and where most of the folks around you are also doubtful and uncertain.
But it feels like the end result is that we’re going to go around in circles forever, because the fact that we’ve been going around in circles is evidence that there’s lots of uncertainty, which makes people less confident, so it can’t possibly be accepted without more discussion, so we go around in circles some more…
The reason I’m pressing you here is because at feel like at this point we have a process issue, not a technical issue. The technical issues have been discussed to death, and led to some valuable refinements and a much clearer text. If someone wants to raise a new substantive issue or thinks I missed something in the PEP text then I’m still happy to discuss it. But at this point I literally have no idea what else there is to discuss; to me the PEP feels more completely baked than any of the accepted PEPs I’ve ever been involved with. And I think the status quo is hugely disrespectful of volunteer time, and I don’t think it’s OK for us to keep disrespecting volunteers just because the alternative got accidentally filibustered. (And also, I keep hearing complaints about how the pip upgrade problem is still blocking the manylinux2010 transition. But really it’s the part where we’re disrespecting people that gets me.)