Phillip J. Eby wrote:
I'm actually happy to hear that there's this much energy available -- hopefully some of it can be harnessed towards positive solutions.
When I began developing setuptools, I often asked for the input of packagers, developers, etc., through the distutils-sig... and was met with overwhelming silence. So the fact that there is now a group of people who are ready to work for some solutions seems like a positive change, to me.
I can appreciate how frustrating silence is when you call for input. Let's see if we can keep the volunteer energy going this time around.
It's hard to make design decisions regarding itches you don't personally have, and which other people won't help scratch. Unfortunately, a lot of the proposals from packaging system people have been of the form of, "fix this for us by breaking things for other people". Not all of them, though. Many have been very helpful, contributing troubleshooting help and good patches.
That some of those good patches took nearly a year to get into setuptools (some from Fedora just got into 0.6c8 that were sent to me almost a year ago) is because I'm the only person reviewing setuptools patches, and I've spent only a few days in the last year doing focused development work on setuptools (as opposed to answering questions about it on the SIG).
It's never a good thing when people's patches sit around, regardless of where they come from. But that's not the same thing as *rejecting* the patches.
I and others appreciate your call for more patches on various topics. However a long delay in applying them will discourage contribution. Are you open to giving certain others patch view/commit privileges to setuptools? I'd be willing to help out, and keep a carefully balanced hand in what is accepted. -Jeff