[Distutils] Idea: move accepted interoperability specifications to packaging.python.org

Nick Coghlan ncoghlan at gmail.com
Sat Apr 18 20:55:26 CEST 2015


On 17 April 2015 at 18:32, Donald Stufft <donald at stufft.io> wrote:
>
> Would Daniel’s change still require a PEP to make it or would it just
> require a PR? If we’re going to make a GitHub repository the source
> of truth for specs would it make sense to just ditch PEPs all together
> and use Pull Requests to handle things? They can have discussion and
> comments and stuff baked into them which could function to capture the
> “Why”.

We'd get a similar model to CPython - clarifications could be done in
a PR, but changes that significantly impact interoperabillity would
still need the additional visibility of the PEP process.

> I’m not sure it’s super useful in general, I don’t see much difference
> between the way we’re using PEPs and the way RFCs are written. They
> often have some light rationalization inside of the meat of the RFC and
> then in the Appendix they have more in depth rationalization.

Right, there wouldn't necessarily need to be much change to the way
the PEPs themselves are written, the reference doc on
packaging.python.org would just be a description of the *latest*
standard on that topic, without the rationale for the changes from the
previous version.

That way, the PEPs could err on the side of "more explanation", secure
in the knowledge that the "just the current recommendations" version
will be readily available on packaging.python.org.

> A bigger problem I have so far is that we don’t really have any user
> facing documentation. For some things that’s fine (you don’t need a user
> facing documentation for Wheels, because users shouldn’t generally be
> manually constructing them), but things like PEP 440, or parts of PEP 426
> we don’t have any real information to point users at to tell them what
> they can and can’t do that isn’t essentially a spec to implement it.

Right, that's really the kind of thing I'm talking about. So perhaps
what I'm asking for isn't to move the specs themselves, but rather
that we add a new "Reference" section to packaging.python.org to
provide the user facing counterpart to the implementor facing PEPs.

Cheers,
Nick.

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


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