[Distutils] Specific packaging goals and a tentative timeline

[Nick Coghlan]

On 19 July 2013 14:06, Nick Coghlan <ncoghlan at gmail.com> wrote:
> Independent activities & miscellaneous suggestions
>
>     * maybe suggest "pip install distlib" over pip gaining its own
> programmatic API?
>     * PEP 8 cleanup (including clarification of what constitutes an
> internal API)
>     * improved PyPI upload API (Donald's working on this)
>     * getting Warehouse to a point where it can be brought online as
> "pypi-next.python.org"
>     * TUF-for-PyPI exploration (the TUF folks seems to have this well in hand)
>     * improved local PyPI hosting (especially devpi)

A significant one I left out here:

    * Getting the "Python Packaging User's Guide" up to scratch, and
deferring to that in the docs on python.org

This is hard to really get going *right now*, since it's tricky to
provide clear guidelines while we're still trying to figure out
exactly what the recommended approach *is*. However, I'm hopeful that
as the core approach stabilises over the next few months we'll be able
to use the guide as a place to capture those instructions, to the
point where we're prepared to start pointing more people to it as the
"one obvious place" to get info about the Python packaging ecosystem.

The reason I consider it independent of the CPython release cycle is
that we're pretty flexible with doc updates, and the online docs for
all branches are refreshed daily. So whenever we deem the packaging
user guide ready for broad consumption, we can adjust the material on
docs.python.org to defer to it. For offline docs, this documented
deprecation of the bundled docs will then get captured in the next
CPython maintenance release (those that need to deal with isolated
networks and working with an entirely private index server
installation are such a special case that we can leave them to deal
with their own documentation, especially since they have the option of
making a private fork of the upstream packaging guide).

Cheers,
Nick.

--
Nick Coghlan   |   ncoghlan at gmail.com   |   Brisbane, Australia