The Steering Council has been discussing PEP 773 for several weeks now. To be completely transparent, we’re at a bit of an impasse because the members of the SC lack deep Windows knowledge and experience. Normally in cases like this, we would delegate the PEP to our resident Windows Expert, however as that’s @steve.dower, and Steve is the author of the PEP, that’s not an appropriate option. We have implicit trust in Steve’s understanding of the needs of Windows users and if he wasn’t the author, delegating to him would be the logical approach. In all likelihood, if the PEP was written by anybody else, we expect Steve acting as PEP Delegate would accept it.
The SC attempted to find another Windows expert who could serve as the PEP Delegate, but this revealed another latent problem: the core developer team currently has a dearth of active Windows experts, and as such, no obvious choice for delegate among the core developers has been identified. We should work to expand our bench of Windows experts, but that’s a discussion for another thread.
Our next thought was to delegate the decision to the release manager of Python 3.14, and/or the group of past release managers. We contacted them, and while we’ve gotten good feedback, no one has stepped up to explicitly volunteer to be the PEP Delegate. Of course this is fine, but it leaves the SC in an awkward position regarding the PEP.
As much as the SC’s experience and knowledge of the situation goes, we think PEP 773 is well-written and likely worthy of acceptance. In our review of this DPO thread, we haven’t identified any blockers or other reasons not to accept this PEP. Longer term, it might be worth asking the PSF User Success Working Group to conduct user studies to better understand the needs of Windows users of Python. However, this process would take some time, and with 3.14 reaching beta status in May, such a study couldn’t realistically be completed in time. While accepting the new Windows installer isn’t strictly tied to Python 3.14 or the beta feature freeze, our understanding is that the deprecation of the existing installers is tied to Python 3.14, so there’s a lot of value in accepting this PEP for 3.14. We’re also confident that any issues that may come up as Python 3.14 matures and more people in the wider community use the new installer, can be easily fixed using the normal Python life cycle and maintenance guarantees.
For all of these reasons, the Steering Council will take the following action.
We intend to accept PEP 773 on Friday, April 25, unless someone can give us good reason not to. As they say “speak now or forever hold your peace”, which you can do by following up here.
This date gives Steve a little more than a week to commit the PEP 773 changes before beta 1, although we do have approval from the Python 3.14 Release Manager @hugovk to allow these changes after beta 1. The SC’s thinking that since we intend to accept it, there’s no reason to wait longer.
Everyone on the SC is grateful to Steve for continuing to care so deeply about the experience of Python users on Windows.