[python-committers] Promote Julien Palard as core developer

[Victor Stinner]

Hi,

I propose to promote Julien Palard as a core developer.

Julien Palard is leading the french translation of the Python
documentation since 2 or 3 years. He spent a lot of time to try to get
this translation online. Since he was unlucky on the python-ideas
mailing list, I convinced him to write down a PEP. He wrote it with
Naoki INADA (who is translated the documentation to Japanese) and me.
It wasn't easy to write the PEP and get it approved: it took almost 1
year and a half! The PEP 545 was approved and implemented in Python
3.7!

   https://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0545/

Thanks to Julien (and others), translated documentations are now online at:

  https://docs.python.org/fr/ -- French
  https://docs.python.org/ja/ -- Japanese

See also the What's New in Python 3.7 entry:
https://docs.python.org/dev/whatsnew/3.7.html#documentation

Julien spent a lot of time to fix a lot of various issues in the
documentation, the docsbuild-scripts project used to build the CPython
documentation, Sphinx, etc. to be able to translate properly the
documentation.

For me, the documentation and the docsbuild-scripts project are
tightly coupled to the CPython project. Last june, I even asked to
give the commit bit to Julien on the
https://github.com/python/docsbuild-scripts/ project on this list,
since I expected that this project was part of CPython (it isn't, it's
another "team" on GitHub, if I understood correctly) :-) In the
meanwhile, Julien became a "core developer" on this project as well.

He also worked closely with the Python infra team to fix a few bugs
when the translated documentation was published at python.org.

To come back to CPython itself, Julien Palard already got 18 commits
merged into the master branch since January 2016: 11 before GitHub
("patch by Julien Palard") + 7 since CPython migrated to GitHub
("Julien Palard" author). Most of his commits are related to the
Python documentation content and tooling to build the documentation.
He fixed "bugs" in the documentation, to clarify some documentation.

Giving him the commit bit would ease his work, since too few people
are looking at these areas of the code. When I reviewed his patches,
they are usually good after one or two iterations, and Julien welcomes
criticism.

I know that Julien doesn't have the typical profile of core
developers, only or mostly contribute to the code: Julien is currently
focused on the doculmentation. But I believe (because he told me so
;-)) that Julien will slowly contribute to other areas of the code,
once he will feel more confortable, and I may guide him in the code if
needed. I think that many of us started to contribute to a project on
its documentation ;-)

I don't think that he needs an official menthor since he already knows
well the CPython workflow, and he knows how to ask questions if needed
;-)

Promoting Julien is part of my global idea/project of trying to
recognize more contributions which are not strictly code, but as
useful or even more useful than code! Python documentation is part of
Python's success. I was told many times that Python has a good
documentation, it's nice to hear that ! IMHO reducing CPython to its C
and Python code is wrong and nor fair, CPython made of much more
"sub-projects".

Victor