[Distutils] Update on Warehouse kickoff and milestones

[Sumana Harihareswara]

As Donald and Nick mentioned last month,[0] several folks are -- thanks
to Mozilla Open Source Support -- working on deploying Warehouse and
making PyPI more sustainable. I'm the main project manager on this
effort and am putting notes on wiki.python.org as we go.[1]

Ernest W. Durbin III gave the closing talk at North Bay Python a few
days ago: "Running Vintage Software: PyPI's Aging Codebase."[2] As he
mentioned (video[3]), he's one of the people who'll be working on this
project, funded by MOSS, to get Warehouse across the finish line! The
full cast is:

* Donald Stufft, backend
* Dustin Ingram, backend
* Ernest W. Durbin III, backend
* Laura Hampton, project management, testing, documentation
* Nicole Harris, frontend and design
* Sumana Harihareswara, project management, product management, testing,
documentation

None of us are working 40 hours/week on this but the six people I listed
above are dedicating committed time to the work. And we're grateful for
help from Mark Mangoba, Eric Holscher, and of course several other folks
who are involved in the PSF, PyPA, or MOSS.

We had a kickoff call on Monday[4] and today a few of us spoke in
#pypa-dev and fleshed out our milestones[5] a bit. This may still
change, but right now, the sequence is:

 1. Maintainer Minimum Viable Product (for package owners) -- ask some
maintainers to use, test, and report back
 2. End User MVP -- ask some Python users who aren't package owners to
use Warehouse, test, and report back
 3. Publicize beta more broadly (invite more testing, redirect some `pip
install` traffic)
 4. Launch/redirect `pip` and browsers to Warehouse
 5. Shut down legacy PyPI
 6. Cool feature ideas that are not on critical path

We'll be putting issues about infrastructure work (e.g., Kubernetes) in
https://github.com/python/pypi-infra . We've started filing, updating,
and arranging issues but that isn't yet complete enough for me to even
start making schedule estimates. I aim to have a clearer picture next
week. (I won't spam this list with updates when there's nothing new to
say, but at least as we start I figure you might want news a few times a
month to learn how things are shaping up; please let me know privately
if my estimation there is way off.)


[0]
https://mail.python.org/pipermail/distutils-sig/2017-November/031782.html
[1] https://wiki.python.org/psf/PackagingWG
[2] https://2017.northbaypython.org/schedule/presentation/5/
[3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xyPd4WOR_ng
[4] https://wiki.python.org/psf/PackagingWG/2017-12-04-Warehouse
[5] https://github.com/pypa/warehouse/milestones
-- 
Sumana Harihareswara
Changeset Consulting
https://changeset.nyc