[Python-Dev] Yearly PyPI breakage

[Brett Cannon]

On Thu, 5 May 2016 at 16:54 David Wilson <dw+python-dev at hmmz.org> wrote:

> This is mostly just observational, and not meant primarily as criticism
> of the fabulous work of Donald and others (ignoring pypa, also the
> prompt, reliable, and skilled support responses common on such places as
> IRC), however I can't help but notice that PyPI governance seems to come
> under fire vastly more often than similar and much more popular
> packaging systems, and some choices that have been made particularly in
> recent years have caused a noticeable amount of dissent with what might
> be considered the typical developer.
>
> When a contributor to the core language is having repeat issues
> maintaining some basic element of the function of the packaging system,
> might it be fair to reflect on how changes to those functions are being
> managed?
>
> There are PEPs covering a great deal of the work done to PyPI recently,
> but, and I say this as someone who has bumped into friction with the
> packaging tooling in the relatively recent past, even I despite my
> motivations to the contrary, I have not read most of them. It seems the
> current process is observed by few, does not sufficiently address the
> range of traditional use cases that were possible in the past, and the
> first the common user learns of a change is when pip (after insisting it
> must be upgraded) fails to function as it previously did.
>
> The usual course then is some complaint, that leads to distutils-sig,
> which ultimately leads to pointing at some design work that was only
> observed by perhaps 50 people max that turns out had some edge cases
> that hurt in a common use case.
>
> Is there something to contemplate in here? I dislike posting questions
> instead of answers, but it seems apparent there is a problem here and it
> continues to remain unaddressed.
>

This is whole thread is off-topic precisely because all of this is
discussed -- in the open -- on distutils-sig and decided there. If people
feel changes need to be made like broadcasting to a wider audience when a
change occurs, then please bring it up on distutils-sig. But if people
choose not to participate then they are implicitly delegating decision
powers to those who do participate (which is totally fine and I'm not
implying that  if people don't participate they are doing something wrong).
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