PEP: Procedure for Adding New Modules (please comment)

[Martijn Faassen]

David Goodger <dgoodger at bigfoot.com> wrote:
> Martijn: Good PEP. Comments:

>> The library PEP
>> differs from a normal standard track PEP in that the reference
>> implementation should in this case always already have been
>> written before the PEP is to be reviewed; the reference
>> implementation _is_ the proposed contribution.

> By "to be reviewed" do you mean "to be decided upon by the Integrators"? Or
> "to be released to the Python community for comment"? I hope the former.
> Please clarify.

The former, I shall clarify, thank you.

>> In the case where no head maintainer can be found (possibly
>> because there are no maintainers left), the integrators will issue
>> a call to the community at large asking for new maintainers to
>> step forward. If no one does, the integrators can decide to
>> declare the contribution deprecated as described in PEP 4.

> I agree with Roman that this needs some explanation. When, why, under what
> conditions, would the Integrators deprecate a contribution? I think
> "maintainerless" is a useful category; after all, most modules do *not*
> require much if any maintenance between releases.

*all* modules require maintenance, if only to check whether it still works.
These maintainers can be PythonLabs or whomever, but there should be
a maintainer.

Do people really want a maintainerless category? That'd be sort of
defeating the point of requiring a maintainer in the first place..

If maintenance is considered trivial, then you or anyone can step forward
and become maintainer, after all. 

Finally, I say 'can decide to declare deprecated', not 'will'. Perhaps
I ought to make this actually *stronger*, so that unmaintained contributions
never persist for a long time.

>> Should there be a list of what criteria integrators use for
>> evaluating contributions?

> It would be useful. I think it would have to come from the PythonLabs crew
> themselves. I think it would be useful to them as well.

I'm helping Carlos Ribeiro with this, who is working on such a list of
criteria.

>> A related question is integration with the Python documentation
>> process. Contributions should come with good documentation that
>> can be integrated with the Standard Library documentation. Should
>> we detail this more in this PEP?

> Say exactly that, with a pointer to the "Documenting Python" section of the
> Python reference.

Okay, sounds good.

Thanks,

Martijn
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