Notes from Python Packaging Council's first meeting

Packaging
1

Hello folks!

The Inaugural PPC had their first meeting on Sept 18, and here’s the notes from that meeting!

  • Greetings, pleasantries, and some non-public discussion [note taker was not sure what is OK to share publicly from this]
    • We didn’t even talk about doing any sort of intro – everyone knows everyone.
  • It was almost entirely a logistics meeting.
    • How/where we’d keep track of what we need to do
      • modeling after the SC, a repository in the python/ org
        • the SC doesn’t have any tooling to be shared with us, unless we count GitHub as a tool
    • How/where/how often we’d meet
      • weekly, for starters. We have a lot to talk about.
    • Who all do we need in our meetings
      • Let’s have PPC + single PSF liason for now, we can invite people as needed and also set up one-offs.
    • How do we want to chat amongst ourselves?
      • Let’s use Discord, at least as our backup chat channel for logistics (hey, join the meeting which is now!)
      • We’ll have separate channels every year, since we would be talking about individuals at times and they might get elected in a future PPC.
    • How are we going to take notes in our meetings
      • Let’s record the transcripts. We might need to redact parts of the transcript though (like personal details from today’s meeting) so let’s share a summary based off of it.
    • Who do we want to meet as a one-off? (at least)
      • Existing delegates, in case there’s anything to handoff
      • PSF board has expressed interest
      • Python Steering Council has expressed interest
      • PSF staff (PyPI and security focus)
      • Distributors (conda, OS distros, etc)
    • We need the PSF board and PSC to update their delegations
    • How will we share notes / communicate with the wider Python community
      • We want to do a good job on this
        • At least one member likes being the note taker in meetings
        • Let’s start by trying to do this async and eagerly
          • Use the next meeting as the last chance to review the notes before publication, if we haven’t published already
      • Let’s post on dpo, although we might want to lock the thread depending on whether we want that to be a discussion channel (or just a broadcast one)
        • Created a dpo group for moderators to be able to message us
      • Let’s use the GitHub repository?
      • Office hours, although logistics TBD (We were over time already)
        • A text-only meeting, like the PSF Board office hours
          • This group is going to be accessible via text on dpo already
        • Let’s try to do video calls
          • logistics TBD
    • We agreed that folks should abstain/recuse themselves from voting on PEPs/topics they’re involved in (eg. Ralf and Donald for wheel variants).
    • We should all get the ability to land PRs in the peps.python.org repository
      • We’ll need to figure out who to get OKs from to do this, probably the SC
    • Moving packaging.python.org out of the pypa
      • We think we should, and the python org is probably the best place? That’s a future task, although let’s get buy-in from active editors now.
  • We briefly discussed what our priorities are.
    • (This discussion resulted in increasing the meeting frequency)
    • Are there any outstanding PEPs?
      • No, but a few are due to be submitted soon! (everyone looked at Ralf, for PEP 725/804)
    • We looked at some analysis that Pradyun did for what people voted for.
    • We talked about the standards process being a priority (it’s closely related to our other topics).
    • We agreed there’s a lot of things to do, and we need more time to have this conversation.
  • Unrelated: We talked about making Ralf a maintainer of packaging, which he expressed interest in.
    • This wasn’t a PPC thing, and it came up since almost all the PPC members were packaging maintainers already and Ralf is a pyproject-metadata maintainer already.
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2

Adding a personal note separately: It’s going to take use a bit of time to do the bootstrapping and setup, as well as make some headway on the trickier topics at hand – it’s very obvious to me that everyone in the group is looking forward to actually making headway on these problems. ^.^

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On the other side of this coin, it might be beneficial to have this transcript—perhaps anonymized—to look back for future PPC members who weren’t around at the time.

I assume these access rights will need to be maintained both by addition and removal as the PPC members are changing.

4

The Steering Council uses Notion to track our agenda, notes, etc. We create a new thing for each term (for the same reasons we also set up a separate new Discord channel every year). IIRC @emily originally set it up and it still works, so that’s what we’ve kept. If that’s something the PPC is interested in using too, maybe the PSF should pay for a license we can share?

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