[python-committers] Eric Araujo (merwok) as Distutils commiter

[M.-A. Lemburg]

Tarek Ziadé wrote:
> On Tue, Jul 27, 2010 at 11:54 AM, Antoine Pitrou <solipsis at pitrou.net> wrote:
>> Le mardi 27 juillet 2010 à 01:50 +0200, Tarek Ziadé a écrit :
>>> Hello,
>>>
>>> I don't want to maintain Distutils anymore for various reasons.  I
>>> will focus for now on on Distutils2, shutil and sysconfig.
>>>
>>> I would like to propose Eric (merwok on IRC) as a commiter to work on
>>> Distutils. He has done a great work in triaging
>>> the bugs and also has now a pretty good knowledge of the Distutils
>>> code. He's a GSOC student for distutils2 and
>>> has done a great coding work in there. I am pretty sure he would love
>>> to do this as I did.
>>
>> Have any significant code patches by Éric been committed to Python core?
> 
> Depending on your definition of core, none. He works on Distutils2 and
> helps me (and other) in the tracker.
> 
>> I may be mistaken in my evaluation, but I'm not sure giving away
>> distutils maintenance to an almost complete beginner is a good idea
>> (since you are basically suggesting that he *replace* you in distutils
>> maintenance).
> 
> I am not sure how you define a complete beginner. As far as Distutils is
> concerned, he's not. He's capable of maintaining Distutils, given the patches
> he provides for Distutils2  (see http://hg.python.org/distutils2). He's also
> now involved in most design discussions, so aware of the various issues.
> 
> Distutils2 is the old Distutils trunk FYI.
> 
> That said, this was just a suggestion to replace me for this maintenance because
> I don't want to do it anymore. Another option is to have you and other core
> devs take over the maintenance, but FWIW I think you are less able
> than him to maintain Distutils, given his experience in the package,
> and the fact
> that he work on the next gen.
> 
> Last, I think Guido's thoughts on giving commiter access earlier matches
> completely this case. I believe Eric has the qualities to become a
> good commiter.
> 
> If the proposal is accepted I'll help him. If you or someone else
> rejects it, then
> good luck with the 150+ Distutils issues and the various ML fights on the topic.
> 
> One last option of course would be to let the package rotten, and just
> fix critical
> bugs when they occur, and wait for distutils2 to take over.

I think there's a difference in granting commit access to the
repo and taking over maintenance of a huge stdlib package.

The first is easy to grant. The second requires more support from
the developer community to be successful. Without knowing how
Eric works, I think it's difficult to judge whether he'd be
a good maintainer or not. Why not start with giving him commit
rights and then see how things work out for a few months. After
that we could then assign the maintenance to Eric.

FWIW: I think you've done a great job at maintaining distutils
and I'd like to thank you for that.

-- 
Marc-Andre Lemburg
eGenix.com

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