[Distutils] Need for respect (was: PEP 438, pip and --allow-external)

[Donald Stufft]

On May 15, 2014, at 8:53 AM, Paul Moore <p.f.moore at gmail.com> wrote:

> This has always been a major difficulty with the PEP process, and any
> similar consensus approach - the huge majority of users simply aren't
> active in "the community". And furthermore, it's very hard to get
> feedback from people who agree with you, so there's an inevitable bias
> towards negative feedback - which isn't to say we can discount it! We
> simply have to do the best we can.

Right. It's a simple fact that the majority of the people who use these tools,
both on the publishing and consuming side, will never participate in the
designing of those tools. They do not want to become experts on packaging and
they just want to solve the problems that interest them and want the tools to
not get in their way while they do it.

Even if we go out and engage these people (as I try to do) and try to figure
out what they want, it's difficult to do because often times you can't take
what they *say* they want as what they actually want because they often don't
fully think things through (due to it being something they don't want to think
about) or they don't think about the larger picture and only focus on one
narrow aspect of the problem space.

Going out and engaging these people and reading between the lines to figure out
what they *actually* want is our job and it is key to turning the ship that is
packaging around from a constant pain point in everyone's workflow to something
that "just works" for people.

-----------------
Donald Stufft
PGP: 0x6E3CBCE93372DCFA // 7C6B 7C5D 5E2B 6356 A926 F04F 6E3C BCE9 3372 DCFA

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