Structure of the Packaging Strategy Discussions

It feels like they’re winding down to be honest. There are two super long threads full of valuable info (if in a very messy form):

That’s 3.5 month worth of discussion, and almost 500 posts (plus a few blog posts and other spinoffs). The Python Packaging Strategy Discussion - Part 2 thread in contrast is only 65 posts (and less new/insightful perhaps too), and no one has posted there in 15 days now.

Without a much clearer plan for following up on these discussions, I think the energy is going to continue ebbing away.

@steve.dower gave a couple of good examples/suggestions higher up already: a policy doc, a whitepaper, a website like pypackaging-native. @lwasser’s guide is also a good example of a possible outcome - she has done a really nice job of iterating on content, asking maintainers (which overlap with participants in the threads here) for feedback on accuracy of what she wrote and whether the guidance represents best practices. That kind of effort helps distill shared knowledge as well as open issues and pain points. Finally, updates to existing documentation would also be a great outcome.

Given the breadth of topics we’ve covered so far, I’d expect at least 2-3 separate documents, possibly in very different formats.

I do not think that is possible, beyond setting out how to go from these threads to those documents, and what they are (topics, format). The questions and goals are still ill-defined, and for the main questions/goals for which we have a rough understanding of what they are, there is no consensus opinion on an answer.

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