PEP 772: Packaging Council governance process (Round 3)

Packaging Coordination
100

This is post #100, so it’s a nice checkpoint to be doing a summary/plan for next steps. It is nice that everyone agrees having it written down will help, so here goes… :slight_smile:

Below is the plan, as it stands right now – I’m writing it with the understanding that it might need to change the moment it makes contact with reality.[1]

Next steps are gonna be two parallel “tracks” of progress:

  • Clearly have a closing discussion & freeze date communicated.
    • Communicate PEP changes since this thread started.
    • Change anything that needs changes, if any more discussion happens.
    • Freeze the text, on relevant date.
      • Any changes that aren’t made will need to happen after the Packaging Council is established / after stopping the approval train.
  • Do the pypa-committers membership sync (prior to the approval train getting there!)
    • committers, not on list: reach out via known contact points, and ask for relevant email. Has a soft deadline of early Jan for responses, before the approval process starts.
    • non committers, on list: remove these individuals, and let them know via the subscribed email address about the change.

After the freeze date, we’d be starting on the approval train (for the one last time, hopefully!)…

  • Start the approval train.
    • Board (mid Jan)
    • pypa-committers (late Jan)
    • SC (Feb)
  • PEP is approved! :tada:

Up next, let’s elect and establish the council:

  • Election returns officer outlines & documents the election timeline.
  • Election starts, happens & results are announced.
  • There is now a Packaging Council! :tada:
    • SC & PSF execute their procedural pieces, shortly after.
  • Packaging Council starts doing the relevant things!

[my opinions on the things above that still need to be picked & settled]

I don’t know yet what the freeze date will be. I do think that the best time is one-of now, next week or sometime early-Jan. IIUC, the PSF board will meet somewhere between Jan 10-15 (based on past years), so having it on their agenda by then would be ideal.

I’m doing the whole pypa-committers membership sync now-ish. To overcommunicate a bit: I will be writing down what I’m doing, and will only post some sanitized version of it publicly – I don’t wanna be posting peoples’ emails publicly without permission.[2]

If this all doesn’t happen in ~2 months (by Feb), I think we won’t have a council in the first half of the year due to logistics.[3]

  1. The PEP authors also have a shared checklist now FWIW, and this is based off of that. ↩︎

  2. While I do hope that folks will trust me to be doing things correctly here… I’d appreciate if someone who has access to both the lists of github.com/pypa members & pypa-committers.python.org members would be willing to double-check what I’d be doing. ↩︎

  3. A lot of the PSF staff will be focused on organizing PyCon US as we move close to May, and an inaugral election is a lotta work. IDK if both can happen in parallel.
    Hopefully this next bit is self-evident: I don’t intend to rush the process or force certain decisions here. :sweat_smile: ↩︎

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