[Distutils] Who could be lead developer? (was: Colour this bikeshed: Name for setuptools fork)

[David Lyon]

> "P.J. Eby" <pje at telecommunity.com> writes:
 
> However, AFAIK, nobody qualified for the job of setuptools maintainer
> actually *wants* the position, myself included. (This is not to say
> that such qualified persons do not exist, I'm just saying that I don't
> know of them at the moment.)

I don't know what your expectations of qualifications are exactly.

But I can guess that basically you want somebody that understands
packaging and somebody that doesn't want to hack your code to
pieces so that you lose control of it. This is perfectly fair
and reasonable.

The person needs to accept that the coding style "should'nt'
change. Which actually I do. In any software project, you
should have only one coding stuff - whether it is right or
wrong.

In my job, I actually do some sysadmin for, can you believe
a dBase-IV system. There's an old guy there who "did everything"
and everybody tries to dislodge him because everything is "old".

But he signs the cheques for my invoices.. haha and what
that means is that help him keep his dBase-IV system alive
15 yrears after everybody says it should have died.

My point is that to a large degree, setuptools is now a
legacy system. I'm a professional legacy system maintainer.

For setuptools, If I was given the job as temporary maintainer,
I would have no intentions to introduce any new features..
(instead leaving that for the author), or make any significant
changes.

The only job would be to apply patches.. perphaps changing
the coding style into the "original" style.

Maintaining something like setuptools is like changing the
oil and keeping air in the tyres.

By not allowing maintainance (or only allowing people that
don't have the time to do it), there will be no oil changes
and no air in the tyres. The predictable outcome is going to
be that the machinery is heading for a major seizure.

$25 worth of oil could have prevented it...

Maybe there are bargain-hunters who want to take over
setuptools for the price of $25.. but I'm not one of them.

Rather, we have $25 that we want to give for oil so
we can keep having rides on the machine and so that
it doesn't die...

David

(ps - to keep an old car in the garage, if you want
the motor not to sieze, you still have to change the
oil and let it run for ten minutes every month or
so.)






> 
> Since there are people who have demonstrated significant desire to
> continue development of setuptools — heck, they're organising a fork of
> it solely because they want its development to proceed — the “wants
> to”
> criterion is evidently satisfied.
> 
> So I can only interpret the above as saying that those who have
> demonstrated that they want to, are not qualified.
> 
> Is that what you're saying? If not, what *are* you saying?
> 
>> But lack of qualified volunteers is not me "preventing" anyone doing
>> anything.
> 
> You are preventing people from continuing development of setuptools *as
> setuptools*. That's the main complaint I'm seeing in this discussion,
> and your explanation in this latest message reinforces that.
> 
> You may have good justification for preventing people from doing that,
> but I wish you'd acknowledge that this *is* preventing people from doing
> something they've expressed a clear desire to do.
> 
>> Obviously, I am not "preventing" anyone from forking it.
> 
> Forking is the option of last resort. It's good that we *have* that
> option — heck, it's one of the main reasons to prefer free software —
> but it's far less preferable than continuance of the project under the
> same banner.