![](https://secure.gravatar.com/avatar/65389a0139a1dfc8a07f6357f0793a62.jpg?s=120&d=mm&r=g)
On 27/07/2010 12:00, M.-A. Lemburg wrote:
Tarek Ziadé wrote:
On Tue, Jul 27, 2010 at 11:54 AM, Antoine Pitrou<solipsis@pitrou.net> wrote:
Le mardi 27 juillet 2010 à 01:50 +0200, Tarek Ziadé a écrit :
Hello,
I don't want to maintain Distutils anymore for various reasons. I will focus for now on on Distutils2, shutil and sysconfig.
I would like to propose Eric (merwok on IRC) as a commiter to work on Distutils. He has done a great work in triaging the bugs and also has now a pretty good knowledge of the Distutils code. He's a GSOC student for distutils2 and has done a great coding work in there. I am pretty sure he would love to do this as I did.
Have any significant code patches by Éric been committed to Python core?
Depending on your definition of core, none. He works on Distutils2 and helps me (and other) in the tracker.
I may be mistaken in my evaluation, but I'm not sure giving away distutils maintenance to an almost complete beginner is a good idea (since you are basically suggesting that he *replace* you in distutils maintenance).
I am not sure how you define a complete beginner. As far as Distutils is concerned, he's not. He's capable of maintaining Distutils, given the patches he provides for Distutils2 (see http://hg.python.org/distutils2). He's also now involved in most design discussions, so aware of the various issues.
Distutils2 is the old Distutils trunk FYI.
That said, this was just a suggestion to replace me for this maintenance because I don't want to do it anymore. Another option is to have you and other core devs take over the maintenance, but FWIW I think you are less able than him to maintain Distutils, given his experience in the package, and the fact that he work on the next gen.
Last, I think Guido's thoughts on giving commiter access earlier matches completely this case. I believe Eric has the qualities to become a good commiter.
If the proposal is accepted I'll help him. If you or someone else rejects it, then good luck with the 150+ Distutils issues and the various ML fights on the topic.
One last option of course would be to let the package rotten, and just fix critical bugs when they occur, and wait for distutils2 to take over.
I think there's a difference in granting commit access to the repo and taking over maintenance of a huge stdlib package.
The first is easy to grant. The second requires more support from the developer community to be successful. Without knowing how Eric works, I think it's difficult to judge whether he'd be a good maintainer or not. Why not start with giving him commit rights and then see how things work out for a few months. After that we could then assign the maintenance to Eric.
+1
FWIW: I think you've done a great job at maintaining distutils and I'd like to thank you for that.
+1
Michael
-- http://www.ironpythoninaction.com/ http://www.voidspace.org.uk/blog
READ CAREFULLY. By accepting and reading this email you agree, on behalf of your employer, to release me from all obligations and waivers arising from any and all NON-NEGOTIATED agreements, licenses, terms-of-service, shrinkwrap, clickwrap, browsewrap, confidentiality, non-disclosure, non-compete and acceptable use policies (”BOGUS AGREEMENTS”) that I have entered into with your employer, its partners, licensors, agents and assigns, in perpetuity, without prejudice to my ongoing rights and privileges. You further represent that you have the authority to release me from any BOGUS AGREEMENTS on behalf of your employer.