[Python-Dev] Misc/maintainers.rst

[Georg Brandl]

R. David Murray schrieb:
> I floated a proposal on stdlib-sig to create a file named
> Misc/maintainers.rst.  The purpose of this file is to collect knowledge
> about who knows which modules well enough to make decision about issues
> in the tracker when the participants in the issue aren't sure, and to
> write down the community knowledge about who has special interest and
> expertise in specific topic areas.
> 
> This proposal was met with approval and, after a couple of small
> modifications of the proposal, no dissent; so I've created the skeleton
> of the file.  I've filled in some of the blanks where I had personal
> knowledge, was told info on IRC, from the two referenced PEPs, and
> from PEP 11.
> 
> Feel free to respond with comments about the header text, but more
> importantly let me know what you know about who (especially if it is you)
> should be listed for each module, platform, and topic, and feel free to
> suggest additional topics.  My goal is to record the community knowledge.

One thing I'd like to see in the list are real names of committers,
not tracker names.  Of course, people looking for people to assign a bug
to should not have to search for the tracker name, so I'd like to make
another request (that Brett already made when we switched trackers):

  Could we *please* have tracker names that match the committer names?

(This doesn't even need to be done by the individual users, I would
volunteer to rename all committer accounts and notify them by email that
their name changed.  This will also be coordinated with the new names
used for Mercurial commits, if a change will be made.)

> Another topic of discussion that is orthogonal to filling in the table is
> whether or not to publish it outside the repository.  Jesse would like to
> see it included in the Python Documentation, and Georg has suggested the
> possibility of creating a separate, sphinx-based, automatically-uploaded
> document collection in the repository to contain this and related
> information (Misc/devdocs?).

For those who aren't on stdlib-sig, I'd like to elaborate a bit on that:
There are quite a few resources for and about Python core development,
but they aren't very accessible.  For example, there's Misc/developers.txt
and the upcoming maintainers.txt.  Then there's the dev FAQ, but it's not
maintained where developers usually look, but on the website.  Etc.
So the plan would be to consolidate these into another set of rst docs,
having them in the repo, editable by every committer, as well as published
somewhere on python.org (devdocs.python.org or somesuch).

cheers,
Georg

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