[Distutils] Colour this bikeshed: Name for setuptools fork

[Lennart Regebro]

2009/7/17 P.J. Eby <pje at telecommunity.com>:
> At 04:53 PM 7/17/2009 +0200, Lennart Regebro wrote:
>>
>> 2009/7/17 P.J. Eby <pje at telecommunity.com>:
>> > Setuptools was something I originally wrote for common requirements in
>> > my
>> > work projects...  then expanded into a funded project to provide
>> > Chandler
>> > with a plugin infrastructure.  These days, I don't have time to code on
>> > the
>> > projects I *enjoy* and *want* to code on...  and setuptools as it stands
>> > today is not one of those projects.
>>
>> This is completely understandable, and a good reason not to work on
>> it. The problem is that you simultaneously have prevented others to
>> work on it,
>
> False.  Jim Fulton has had commit privileges for ages (and has committed
> sizable chunks of code), and Ian Bicking would be equally welcome to them,
> if he asked.  (Ian contributed the Python 2.6 egg for the 0.6c9 release, and
> of course he pioneered support for Subversion and Sourceforge downloads in
> easy_install.)  And I'd seriously consider Philip Jenvey as well, as he's
> done a ton of Jython-compatibility work.
>
> In other words, people I know and trust to be qualified for the job are
> quite free to maintain it.  If Jim or Ian wanted to "adopt" setuptools or
> become primary maintainers, I'd frankly jump at the opportunity!
>
> Mainly, I trust Jim and Ian because they're thorough, cautious, and
> sensitive to "legacy" issues.  I know they're not going to go in and reverse
> years of policy until and unless they have a damn good understanding of both
> the old and the new requirements, and have a plan to address compatibility
> and migration.
>
> (Hell, I'd also consider the folks at Enthought, who (like Jim and Ian) have
> built sizable systems atop setuptools and had to deal with a nice variety of
> end-user configuration quirks.  I would guess them to be equally
> requirements-educated and production-cautious.)
>
> However, AFAIK, nobody qualified for the job of setuptools maintainer
> actually *wants* the position, myself included.  (This is not to say that
> such qualified persons do not exist, I'm just saying that I don't know of
> them at the moment.)
>
> But lack of qualified volunteers is not me "preventing" anyone doing
> anything.  Obviously, I am not "preventing" anyone from forking it.

This is an unreasonable position. You are adopting the position that
only the persons that you know do not have time to maintain it should
be allowed to do so, That has put us through a lot of unnecessary
pain, just because you are not willing to let go of something you no
longer are willing to maintain.

I which we somehow could get control over the setuptools name on PyPI.
Setuptools is dead, you are not interested in maintaining it, we
should in fact not need to rename it at all.

-- 
Lennart Regebro: Python, Zope, Plone, Grok
http://regebro.wordpress.com/
+33 661 58 14 64