[Distutils] If you want wheel to be successful, provide a build server.

[Paul Moore]

On 25 May 2016 at 16:11, Thomas Güttler <guettliml at thomas-guettler.de> wrote:
>> The contributors here are (mainly) volunteers working on
>> infrastructure provided by a public interest charity, not your
>> personal servants to be ordered about as you feel inclined.
>
> You seem to be angry. Why?

I don't know about Nick, but your tone is certainly annoying to me. I
do this work in my (very limited!) spare time, and in most cases, what
I do is of no benefit to me personally, but is purely to help others
who raise issues.

Your comment "If you want wheel to be successful, **provide a build
server**" is both patronising (do you think no-one here is aware that
a build server would be beneficial?), inaccurate (wheels *are*
successful - ask anyone who's got benefit from them, it's not hard to
find such people) and demanding (you suggest others need to do work,
but offer none of your own time to help).

Many of your postings here have had a similar tone - insisting that
things "have to be" done a certain way, or that there "must" be a
solution in the form you prefer. I've tended to assume that this has
simply been unintentional, and maybe getting exaggerated by the lack
of non-verbal cues available in email, but you need to consider your
words more carefully if you don't want to start seriously offending
people. And that's not behaviour that's acceptable on this list (or
indeed, any of the other Python lists).

> I am just bringing information from A to B (from github issue
> to this list).

Your information was phrased as a demand. If you don't think that's
the case, I encourage you to re-read your own post.

> I guess the author of psutil is just a volunteer like you are.

Yes, and (on the issue you linked to) he politely explained why he
didn't provide Linux binaries and offered some approaches you could
take. You seemed to take that as somehow implying that he was
dissatisfied and posted "information" here implying that. I hope you
didn't mean it that way, but in doing so, as far as I can tell you
misrepresented him.

> What is the problem? I think the problem is that
> creating wheels for psutil is difficult.

Hardly. The problem is that Unix systems are very diverse, and trying
to maintain compatible builds for all the variations is more work than
a single volunteer can manage. The people working on manylinux on this
mailing list have put a *lot* of work into trying to alleviate that
issue. Maybe the psutil author hasn't heard of this, or maybe he's not
had the time to investigate or take advantage of it. Or maybe he
doesn't feel (or indeed, he's sure - after all, psutil is a very
low-level package) that manylinux isn't the right answer for his
project.

But just because you personally weren't willing to set up the
prerequisites to build a copy of psutil for yourself, doesn't mean
that "creating wheels for psutil is difficult".

> I think we all agree on this.

No.

> If not, if you think it is easy, then please tell us.

Building and publishing wheels for every platform variation your user
base might be interested *is* difficult, simply because of the scale
of the problem and the fact that most volunteer developers don't have
access to all those platforms. And yes, a build farm would help those
people. But it's not anyone's *responsibility* to provide that.
Indeed, the whole open source ecosystem is built on people seeing a
need and *putting their own effort into making it happen, and then
sharing the results*. You seem to think that your contribution should
be to nag people who are already providing freely of their time, to do
more, so that you don't have to.

> My intention was, to find a solution.

Well, it didn't come across that way.

>From another post:
> I am volunteering for doing coordination work:
>  - communication
>  - layout of datastructures
>  - interchange of datastructures.
>  - no coding
>
> But we need at least ten people how say "I'm willing to help"

We don't need project managers for this task. We need people willing
to code, build servers, etc. If (and it's a big if) the management of
the work becomes too much of an overhead for those people, then (and
*only* then) they might appreciate some help with the administrative
tasks. But volunteering to co-ordinate resources that don't exist is
not useful. Nor is trying to find such resources from the pool of
people who are *already* doing plenty. If you want to find resources,
I suggest you look among people who are not yet contributing to the
packaging ecosystem.

Paul