[Distutils] the future of setuptools development

[zooko]

Dear PJE:

Thank you so much for inventing setuptools and for bringing it to its  
current
level of maturity.

It seems that you don't have time right now to be the sole maintainer of
setuptools.  Opening up a codebase to commits from multiple people is  
always
risky, but once a project is big and successful enough, multiple  
maintainers are
often needed to make sufficiently fast progress.

Fortuately, there is a good way to ameliorate the risks and to help  
multiple
programmers coordinate with one another: unit tests.

Also fortunately, Tarek Ziadé and Chris Galvan have spent some time  
recently
writing tests for setuptools.  Please give those two folks commit  
privileges to
the setuptools SVN repository so that they will be maximally  
empowered and
encouraged to continue that work!

We -- the community of people who care enough about setuptools to  
spend time
improving it -- will make an effort to maintain setuptools's high  
level of
quality, both by automated testing, by code review, and by manual  
testing in
real-world deployments.

Thanks,

Your user,

Zooko