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
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.
Adding a personal note separately: It’s going to take 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. ^.^
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.
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?
Maybe https://peps.python.org/pep-0694/? I think this PEP is something everyone wants but might be a little stuck, both the authors & PEP delegate (me) are spread thin and so this might benefit from the council’s attention to get it un-stuck.
In PEP 729 (which established the Typing Council) we said:
Members of the council will be eligible to sponsor PEPs. If this PEP is accepted, PEP 1 should be amended to note this fact.
But there’s no corresponding provision for the Packaging Council. Conversely, we haven’t actually given Typing Council members commit access to the peps repo. It looks like one PEP was sponsored by a non-core dev Typing Council member (PEP 764, by Eric Traut), but I was added as a code owner instead.
It seems reasonable to me to give the members of the Packaging Council commit access to the peps repo; I’m comfortable making that call as a PEP editor. Changing PEP 1 to pre-approve Packaging Council members as sponsors also seems reasonable but needs Steering Council approval.
Noted – it’s now on the PPC’s discussion topics list. I do think it’s going to come up after a bunch of other topics though.
Thank you!
We do have a meeting with the SC in the coming weeks, and I expect we’ll bring this up then, and also whether they think we ought to get OKs from anyone else!
It’s rising back to the top of my to-do list. I’m planning next week to do another review pass through @cjames23PR extending stages to the legacy upload API (and a few other things).
Thanks for sharing the notes, this was really awesome and I hope it remains constant. Maybe even clearer to have a summary as to what decisions were made vs deferred?
It might be useful to have that as brief bullet points somewhere the public could view if it doesn’t exist yet today so folks might be able to see what the elected representatives are considering chatting about next. I know I’m interested!
I specifically chose the shortest name I could think of for the Typing Council so people wouldn’t be tempted to use a cryptic abbreviation. But people use “TC” regularly anyway.
The PPC seems to be embracing the abbreviation though.
I was kinda rooting for PyPC (would also match with PyPI and previously PyPA), not least because in my corner of the ecosystem, PPC is a very common abbreviation for PowerPC[1].
But I harbour no illusions that this acronym would change, and I guess it’ll be clear from context.
e.g. the architecture ppc64le is often just referred to as PPC these days (since big-endian and 32bit arches are effectively dead). ↩︎
