[Distutils] Moving PEP 541 (PyPI's name management policy) forward

[Nick Coghlan]

Hi folks,

As Sumana mentioned in her latest summary email, we've been looking at
PEP 541 again, and figuring out how best to manage the process for
getting that approved so that the folks handling name management
requests can start relying on it.

The key challenge with it has been the fact that this document is
essentially defining a new operational policy for the Python Software
Foundation (as the legal entity behind PyPI), and given that it
relates to naming things on the internet, we can reasonably expect it
to prove potentially contentious (and perhaps even turn litigious if
someone *really* doesn't like a decision that was made in accordance
with the policy).

Approving that kind of policy would be a significant burden to place
on the shoulders of a single volunteer, so we discussed it in the
PSF's Packaging working group [1] (which decides how best to allocate
any funding the PSF receives or allocates specifically to support the
packaging infrastructure), and amended the approval process for this
particular PEP as follows:

- the BDFL-Delegate is now Mark Mangoba, in his role as the PSF's IT manager
- rather than approving the PEP directly, Mark will instead put it
forward for a vote in the Packaging Working Group (similar to the way
we handle funding allocation decisions)
- input from the PSF's General Counsel will be explicitly requested
prior to the vote

The commit making those changes can be found here:
https://github.com/python/peps/commit/6c356f0472b38e69e8a59a2dee1f275b61aeafab

distutils-sig will remain the mailing list for discussing the actual
contents of the policy (and any future amendments to it) - the change
in approach just makes it clearer that the policy needs to be
explicitly adopted by the PSF as an entity, rather than by an
individual volunteer.

Regards,
Nick.

[1] https://wiki.python.org/psf/PackagingWG

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