[Distutils] The pypa account on BitBucket

[Nick Coghlan]

On Wed, Mar 20, 2013 at 10:39 AM, Marcus Smith <qwcode at gmail.com> wrote:
> Nick:
>
> I'm not sure who owns it yet.

I ran into Jannis before he left this morning, and he was fairly sure
someone decided it would also be a good idea to register it on
BitBucket after the GitHub group was set up.

> If it is one of us, then it would need to be a group vote to use the pypa
> "brand name" like this.
> I'll try to get all the pypa people to come here and register their opinion.
>
> here's my personal thoughts:
>
> I understand the motivation to reuse our name, but probably less political
> to start a new nifty short name.

A big part of my role at this point is to take the heat for any
potentially political or otherwise controversial issues (similar to
the way Guido takes the heat for deciding what colour various
bikesheds are going to be painted in the core language design - the
"BDFL-Delegate" title was chosen advisedly).

While we certainly won't do it if you're not amenable as a group, I'll
be trying my best to persuade you that it's a good idea to turn your
self-chosen name into official reality :)

> "pypack" or something. "pack" as in a group of people, but also short for
> "packaging"

The reason I'd like permission to re-use the name is because I want to
be crystal clear that pip *is* the official installer, and virtualenv
is the official way to get venv support in versions prior to 3.3, and
similar for distlib and pylauncher (of course, I also need to make
sure Vinay is OK with that, since those projects currently live under
his personal repo).

I don't want to ask the pypa to change its name, and I absolutely *do
not* want to have people asking whether or not pypa and some other
group are the ones to listen to in terms of how to do software
distribution "the Python way". I want to have one group that the core
Python docs can reference and say "if you need to distribute Python
software with and for older Python versions, here's where to go for
the latest and greatest tools and advice". If we have two distinct
names on GitHub and PyPI, it becomes that little bit harder to convey
that pylauncher, pip, virtualenv, distlib are backwards compatible
versions of features of Python 3.4+ and officially endorsed by the
core development team.

> In the spirit of the blog post,  here's the 2 doc projects I'd like to see
> exist under this new ~"pypack" group account, and be linked to from the main
> python docs.
>
> 1)  "Python Packaging User Guide":  to replace the unmaintained Hitchhiker's
> guide,  or just get permission to copy that in here and get it up to date
> and more complete.
> 2)  "Python Packaging Dev Hub": a simpler name to replace
> "python-meta-packaging"
>
> give the ~10-15 people that are actively involved in the various packaging
> projects and PEPs admin/merge access to help maintain these docs.

Yes, that sounds like a good structure.

> and then announce this on python-announce as real and supported indirectly
> by the PSF.

It's not PSF backing that matters, it's the python-dev backing to add
links from the 2.7 and 3.3 versions of the docs on python.org to the
user guide on the new site (and probably from the CPython dev guide to
the packaging developer hub). That's a fair bit easier for me to sell
if it's one group rather than two.

> people will flock IMO to follow it and contribute with pulls and issues

Yes, a large part of my goal here is similar to that of the PSF board
when Brett Cannon was funded for a couple of months to write the
initial version of the CPython developer guide.

Cheers,
Nick.

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