Hi,

I am launching a fork of setuptools. The name is "Distribute". (not definitive) and will be community-driven

This fork will remain 100% compatible with setuptools, and follow closely setuptools evolutions.

Roadmap
=======

- Distribute 0.1 (09/27/2008)

The first release of Distribute will be done at the end of this week, targeting setuptools 0.6x,
and will provide all latest bugfixes done in the 0.6 branches of setuptools, like Subversion 1.5 compatibility.

- Distribute 0.2 (10/27/2008)

The 0.2 release will be done in 1 month, targeting setuptools current trunk, and will focus on
providing a maximum of bugfixes. You can provide patches, or aks for a particular bug to be fixed.
Use the launchpad bug tracker for that https://bugs.launchpad.net/distribute

- Distribute 0.3

The 0.3 release will contain new features and improvments, and its release date decide when 0.2 comes out.

Project managment
===============

Distribute is using launchpad (https://launchpad.net/distribute) and bzr and anyone that wants to
contribute is welcome to provide a branch.

The branch are merged if they provide tests and if there is a consensus of the community
on it.

The process is as follow for a contribution:

- create a bzr branch
- talk about it on distutils-SIG, using [distribute] in the header, asking for review/merge
- it is discussed in the mailing list
- if no one objects, and if it has tests, it will be merged by a maintainer

I am the maintainer at this point but this role will be extended to other people that want to become
a maintainer, so I will not become a botlleneck for this project.

A maintainer has to be nominated by 100% of the maintainers, and there will be at most
4 maintainers in this project. Maintainers are added or removed after each release.
They work together to release the next milestone.

Let me know if you want to become a maintainer. Maintainers need to discuss their changes
as well on the mailing list, and their only privilege is being able to merge branches on the main branch,
because they are trust to do so.

Cheers
Tarek

--
Tarek Ziadé | Association AfPy | www.afpy.org
Blog FR | http://programmation-python.org
Blog EN | http://tarekziade.wordpress.com/