On 7 August 2017 at 12:19, Randy Syring <randy@thesyrings.us> wrote:
Thanks Donald for the clear reply from which it was easy to create these separate issues. I didn't realize you had so little paid time to work on packaging issues. I'm surprised with all the large companies that use Python that the PSF can't secure more donations to invest in fixing these issues. Or that someone like Redhat can't get a couple engineers to devote time for a couple years like they do to other OSS projects. (No criticism intended, just musing).
Please feel free to criticise Python's commercial redistributors loudly and publicly on this point, as our collective failure to deal with the situation appropriately is something our respective customers *should* be questioning and challenging us over, especially when support contracts are up for renegotiation :) As far as I've been able to work out, the main problem appears to be that the professional Python user base currently self-selects into two primary categories: 1. "We're happy to rely on self-support and community support, so we don't need a Python vendor" 2. "Our ops team pays a commercial Python runtime vendor, but our dev teams have no ability to file support requests with that vendor" In combination, these behaviours mean vendors' commercial demand signals are thoroughly broken, creating an environment where it becomes difficult to make the business case that increased upstream investment will lead to proportional increases in revenue. (To help illustrate the scale of the problem, while omitting names to protect the guilty: "Do people in large organisations actually use Python for web development?" is something I have had a redistributor ask as a genuine question in the same month where Python topped IEEE Spectrum's annual survey of language popularity for the first time. When we have that level of disconnect in the perception of ecosystem adoption, something significant is clearly amiss) At the Python Software Foundation level, one of the things we've realised we need to do is to provide more streamlined ways for organisations using Python to direct funding specifically towards infrastructure support for PyPI (with the Packaging Working Group then being responsible for managing those funds), since "We should fund the platform that hosts our Python dependencies" is a potentially easier pitch for engineering teams to make than advocating for their employers to become full PSF Sponsor members. Towards that end, we've recently applied to Mozilla for a development grant to help the PSF fund the design, development, and project management efforts needed to get those improved infrastructure sustainability measures in place, as well as getting to the point where the legacy PyPI service can be shut down entirely, eliminating one of the current major barriers to improving the shared infrastructure (credit goes to Eric Holscher for getting that request through to the grant submission stage - the Packaging WG had started drafting it some time ago, but we'd stalled before reaching the point of actually submitting it). Cheers, Nick. -- Nick Coghlan | ncoghlan@gmail.com | Brisbane, Australia