A lot has happened in October, but there’s not much to report from the SC side.
As a reminder, if you have any questions or concerns, feel free to contact us or open an issue in the SC repo. And the README there links to all the updates.
The Steering Council discussed last week’s Core Development Sprint.
2022-10-17
The Steering Council started planning the next SC election.
The Steering Council discussed two new core developers, saw no reasons for a veto.
The Steering Council discussed PEP 692 (Using TypedDict for more precise **kwargs typing), and decided to express concerns in the Discourse topic.
The Steering Council discussed PEP 669 (Low Impact Monitoring for CPython), agreed to accept in but decided to be careful in messaginig about the acceptance.
The Steering Council discussed PEP 683 (Immortal Objects, Using a Fixed Refcount), agreed to accept it despite concerns about ABI breakage.
That feels like a rather negative way to phrase it. I understand there’s little room for levity in these notes, but couldn’t you use some more positive phrasing, like “the SC decided to welcome them”?
It’s a bit hard to discuss because internal Meta stuff was shared with us. If I remember correctly, it was mostly them sharing stuff about how they use Python, us providing some advice, us asking some questions about how they do some things. Honestly, a good chunk of it was internal sharing about how big corporations solve various Python and engineering problems. No concrete action items came out of the meeting from what I remember.
This phasing is not great. I imagine that the intent is that the SC should accept the vote unless there is a reason not to, but what happens if the SC never takes official notice of the vote? In the United States, the President has 10 days other than Sundays to veto an approved bill and ‘return’ it to the originating house, or it becomes law without signature. (The exception is if Congress ‘adjourns’ before the 10 days is up, preventing a return. The meaning of ‘adjourn’ has been disputed.)
It’s ambiguous based on PEP 13 – Python Language Governance | peps.python.org as you could read it either say, “no action means no veto”, or “the SC needs to explicitly not veto it”. Someone could propose an update to PEP 13 to clarify things. But the chances of the SC being unreachable is minor and go with “silence means acceptance” seems like a potential waste of time and odd way to get around some phrasing in some notes.
Brett already addressed the question for the meetup with Meta, but for the Core Dev sprint, it was just us catching up Petr (who couldn’t be there) on things that were discussed in person (rather than on video calls), and in general reflecting on everything that was discussed. We do have an action item for finding a good mentor for mentors (and other resources for mentors), and we’ve asked Deb to contact a few people she knew about that.
