[Distutils] setuptools 8 changes are great, but ...

[Nick Coghlan]

On 17 December 2014 at 02:48, Donald Stufft <donald at stufft.io> wrote:
>
>> On Dec 16, 2014, at 10:40 AM, Jeremy Stanley <fungi at yuggoth.org> wrote:
>>
>> The way I see it, we're all volunteers. We voluntarily work on free
>> software and associated support infrastructure. Some of us are
>> simply lucky enough to find sponsors willing to pay us to do it full
>> time (and while I won't speak for Donald I get the impression he
>> feels the same, whether he's working on PSF or OpenStack projects).
>
> Yea, I’m incredibly lucky to have found someone willing to pay me for my
> hobby. Rackspace pays me to work on Python packaging as well as pays me
> to work on Openstack.

Similarly, these days I get to spend (Red Hat) work time on helping to
get Fedora to play nice with upstream Python packaging (as well as
helping to wrangle other Python integration challenges, including
providing feedback and advice on the Python 3 migration work, and
playing a significant role in maintaining Red Hat's relationship with
the PSF). While most of my work day still goes to Red Hat internal
infrastructure work (including learning to take advantage of new
technologies like Docker and OpenShift), having that ability to divert
time into upstream when necessary makes a huge difference.

Untangling the issues in the Python packaging ecosystem is just an
incredibly complex change management problem, as anything we do to
tighten up the interoperability standards or the underlying security
model is almost certainly going to break things for someone,
somewhere. Those ecosystem specific constraints are thus far more
heavily weighted as a design consideration than interoperability with
third party versioning conventions (although we do aim to accommodate
those where practical).

Cheers,
Nick.

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