One thing you guys should also consider is automated building/testing of packages. On different platforms.
Let me give you a practical example...
package win32...
latest version.. no longer works on windows 2000...
only works on xp... or vista...
Bad for me.. takes me time to figure out whats wrong...
Only solution.. go back and find an older release.. yes.. i know.. I can do that... that works...
With cloud computing... you can get test environments for every platform
Amazon web services as one example offer this
Perl does nightly "builds" and tests....
their automated test system "tests everything"
Another big issue i dislike with many packages... they depend on having msvc installed to be able to build them.
In many cases because I don't have MSC installed... this prevents me from building some packages. I don't like that...
I don't believe building "everything" on the 5-10 major platforms we have (or however many there are) is too much.
Plus now, we have all these different versions of python.. and instead of getting better it is only seeming to get more worse...
I had this idea of running a test server that would listen to PyPI and get every new package to build it and test it on various platform/python. I think this could be done right now, with how distutils works, It requires creating virtual machines and destroying them every time for security reasons. But it's quite a work... Cheers Tarek -- Tarek Ziadé | http://ziade.org