What do you want in Python packaging's future governance model?

[abravalheri (Anderson Bravalheri)]

Change: Improve the process for reaching consensus or (at least reaching consent) for new standards/PEPs in a way that volunteers feel motivated to implement the change and avoid standards/PEPs that still feel controversial/sour.

Effect: Motivate the community to work towards a truly shared vision and minimise the risk of something like the one reported in the following thread to happen again (I am highlighting below 2 important comments that I feel summarise the problem):

Change in PyPI upload behavior. Intentional, accidental, pebkac?

Absolutely agreed. However, we cannot dictate when tools will implement particular standards, and as a result tools “later” in the chain have to be more lenient than we might otherwise like. To give a concrete example here, none of this would be an issue if backends had been the ones to promptly enforce the change to the spec, rather than PyPI. It sucks that PyPI can’t be strict yet, and as a result we continue to get non-standard filenames being uploaded. But it sucks just as much that PyPI w…

Change in PyPI upload behavior. Intentional, accidental, pebkac?

Until this thread, there was no evidence that the backends were going to catch up. AFAICT setuptools had an ideological disagreement with that requirement, and so there was not “until backends catch up”, it was just going to be “relax requirements… forever”. It’s still not clear that there is agreement from setuptools that they’re willing to implement normalization of filenames. At least one maintainer seems to still be hard against it in the issue tracker. Until that disagreement gets actuall…