I’d second this - it would be really useful to have more of the process available publicly. The summaries are useful, but they give no links for people to check if they want additional detail.
When we did the resolver upgrade for pip, we had a number of internal meetings about progress and plans, but these meetings were always minuted and the minutes published on a public wiki, for people to read if they wanted. The minutes probably weren’t very interesting to anyone outside the team, but that’s not the point, it’s the transparency that’s important.
This is a great example of how I’d prefer more of the process to be publicly available. I’m really unclear on what’s going on with this work, and I know of no way to find out:
- I don’t have a good feel for why it’s being prioritised, I gather that it was the biggest vote on that survey that happened, but there’s a lot I don’t understand about the survey (who was surveyed, why were the specific options included on the survey, etc).
- I don’t know what projects are expected to be impacted. Is there going to be any work for pip here? Will we be involved in any discussions about the design of the feature? What happens if we don’t want to implement it at all?
- How much effort is being diverted from other work to address this project? Even if development is going to be done by externally recruited people, there’s still a need for PR reviews, mentoring, etc. Has anyone discussed whether we want to divert work from other tasks?
- As a paid feature, I’ve seen nothing public about whether Warehouse are happy getting into billing management, and similar. Will we be funding an ongoing “accounts department” for this feature? I wouldn’t feel comfortable if something like that was managed on a volunteer basis Also, where is the revenue from organisation account fees going to go? I don’t recall seeing any discussion on that.
Like others, I don’t know what PEPs you’re talking about here, or what roadblocks. Why not have such discussions in public? Often it’s not PEP authors who will be doing implementations, so by talking to PEP authors, you’re not getting at the root of the problem. For example, as author of PEP 643, I’m unaware of any discussions on this beyond an initial comment I made to you in email:
PEP 643 (Metadata for Package Source Distributions) - getting that into various build backends would be really useful, once that’s in progress, pip can start implement the “consumer” end of the interface, but there’s not much point doing that until the data is getting written. So that would initially involve working with backends (in particular flit and setuptools, and maybe poetry).
There’s a couple of other PEPs I mentioned in the same email, and I’ve never heard anything further:
PEP 621 support in setuptools would also be nice - but that’s a purely setuptools issue, other backends like flit already have this.
There’s work going on around this, but I’m not sure what your involvement (if any) is.
PEP 660 - The only outstanding action here that I know of is to get setuptools to implement this.
I don’t know what’s happening with this.
PEP 658 - I’d love to see this implemented. As far as the Warehouse (PyPI) change is concerned, I assume they have it in hand - I’m not a Warehouse developer, so I don’t know. What would be useful here is co-ordinating expectations around how other implementers of the simple index API (devpi, Artifactory, etc) will implement this, so we don’t end up in a situation where users get a degraded experience unless they use PyPI.
My comments remain the same here. I’ve no awareness of what might be happening here. Is this part of the discussions you mentioned?
On vaguely packaging-related, but actually a core PEP, getting some resolution on what’s happening with PEP 582 would be something I’d personally be interested in, but I don’t know if it comes under the “packaging” remit.
I didn’t get any feedback from you on this one. I feel as though this has the potential to make packaging easier for newcomers, at the very least, so I think it’s worth at least having a discussion with the community on whether it’s a reasonable use of your time to look into it.