There’s no theoretical problem with the council approving a change that affects their own term, and I’m not too worried that a council would like, refuse to change the release cycle just so they can hold onto power longer. But having the council term and the release cycle tied together does add yet another thing we have to talk about to the release cycle discussion, which is itself maybe a bad thing, since discussions always go better when separate issues can be separated. Also, the mere fact of tying their schedule together does tend to suggest to people that each council “owns” a particular release, whether that’s the intent or not. (And to be clear for posterity: it wasn’t the intent :-).)
So… what do we do. I don’t think it’s a huge deal either way – changing the text might be a modest (IMO) improvement, but there hasn’t been much followup on how we want to handle these last-minute changes, so I’m a bit nervous about touching it for a mere “modest” improvement. OTOH, if we leave the text alone, it wins the vote, and then we decide that we want to tweak the schedule (switching to “elections are held after each alpha / every February / whatever”), then it’s really not that hard to make the change. I’m assuming it wouldn’t be particularly controversial, so it’d just be like… someone (you?) writes up the actual text, posts it to python-committers, we click a few buttons to start a vote (we already need the infrastructure for doing this, to handle the council elections in the first place), like 10 people vote because no-one cares that much, 9 of them are in favor, done. Not something you want to be doing three times a week, but really not a big deal. It might even be good practice to go through the process with something simple like this :-).
So I’m leaning towards: if you feel so strongly about this that it’s really your make-or-break for the proposal, then we should change it. (And I have a mild preference for switching to a calendar-based cycle, instead of moving the point in the release cycle.) Otherwise, let’s leave it as is to reduce the disruption.
What do you think?