[Python-Dev] Holding a Python Language Summit at PyCon

[A.M. Kuchling]

The PyCon organizers are planning a Python Language Summit to be held
in Chicago just before the conference, on Thursday March 26 2009.
(This is the second day of tutorials, and the day before PyCon
officially starts.)

The purpose of the Python Language Summit is to let the developers of
Python implementations discuss issues that affect us all, and to let
the developers of a particular implementation discuss their own
project-specific issues.  PyCon brings a lot of the core developers
together into one place and there's been a "Python core" sprint for a
long time, but we haven't had a formal time and place for *discussion*
among core developers.

Attending the summit will be free; registration for PyCon is *not*
included, but won't be required to attend the summit.

I e-mailed some CPython, Jython, IronPython, PyPy, etc. developers
asking for topic suggestions, and assembled a draft of a schedule from
some of the most commonly mentioned topics; the current draft schedule
is below.  The schedule is very 'loose', leaving a fair bit of open
space so that we can hopefully begin working on ideas arising from the
discussion.

* What do you think of the selected topics?

* I'd like to have a champion for each session, who will make a brief
  presentation about the session's topic at the start, laying out the
  issues and possible courses of action to guide the resulting
  discussion.  If you wish to volunteer as the champion for a session,
  please let me know.  (Preference will be given to people actively
  working on the particular topic.)

* For CPython, invitations will be sent to everyone with committer
  status (plus a few book authors, significant patch contributors who
  aren't committers yet, etc.).  If you're not a committer but think
  you can contribute, please let me know privately.  Also, please
  suggest other

* There will probably be summit-related sponsorship opportunities for
  interested companies.


Andrew M. Kuchling
amk at amk.ca
Registration Manager, PyCon 2009
http://us.pycon.org



9:00 - 10:30   
=============

Open discussion session


11:00 - 12:30
=============

Transition plan for rest of 2.x series; goals for 2.7/3.1.
- New features & future plans?
- Is 2.7 last of the 2.x releases?
- Unicode issues
- Stdlib plans?

Champion needed.


12:30 - 14:00
=============

Lunch (probably provided by the PSF or a sponsor).


14:00 - 15:30
=============

Two tracks:

Cross-implementation issues:

  What do the various VMs want/need from CPython to help with their
  implementations?

  * Marking CPython-specific tests in the test suite?
  * Getting an implementation agnostic test suite for the Python language?  
  * Separating the language tests and the pure Python part of the stdlib into 
    a separate project?  (Or publish them as a separate package.)
  * Transition plans for 3.0?

  Champion needed.

Package distribution & installation.

  * setting up an organized network of mirrors ? la CPAN
  * adding a commenting system on PyPI
  * think about a reference implementation for a PyPI client in the
    stdlib (XML-RPC client+upload and register)
  * improvments on packaging matters - this includes distutils but
    also setuptools.

  Champion needed.


16:00 - 17:30
=============

Free space for sprinting, hacking, further discussion, etc.


18:00-ish
=============

Group dinners.