Dear Technical Committee members, as you might imagine I got asked fairly often what is the status of this issue. I've always made clear that any issue brought to the tech-ctte is no DPL matter; the Constitution is very clear about that.
The only thing I could have done to help out a bit is trying some informal mediation, not to leave out any potential solution. I've indeed done a bit of that. I've spoken twice, with a delay of 6 months, with the Python maintainer face to face, trying to see whether there was a possibility of an agreement on a new maintenance team which would have made this bug moot (I'm sure that would have been made happy also the tech-ctte :-P). I've also spoken, sometimes face to face and sometimes in chat replying to "let's ask the DPL what's the status" queries, to others people involved in this matter. Unfortunately, nothing concrete has come out of that yet, most likely due to inability on my side, more than to anything else. On the bright side, I agree with others who have voiced their opinions in this bug log that the situation is nowadays better than what it was when this bug was reported. Not only we now have co-maintained python*-defaults packages, but also (and more importantly) we now have *discussions* on -pyt...@lists.d.o on migration strategies and other important topics. Those discussions include both Debian people and upstream developers and might even hint future maintenance teams, which is good. While it is true that the Python maintainer is not always participating into them, it is also clear that he follows them and seems to agree with where they are going. Nevertheless, the big issue is undeniably still open: maintenance of the main Python interpreter packages is still up to a single maintainer, with no mutual trust and/or communication between him and (most of) the rest of the Debian Python community. Additionally, as DPL, I'm worried by seeing packages as important as the Python interpreters maintained by a single person. Even if all other surrounding issues were not there, that would be a bus-factor problem worth fixing by itself. (I concede there are other similar situations in the archive, but this is no excuse; they are just other problems to be solved.) All that said, one of the few remaining actions I can take on this issue is to friendly ping the tech-ctte to actually decide on this issue, open for 7 months now. I do think tech-ctte is a very useful device in Debian and I want Debian to trust it as an efficient device; I would appreciate if you can help me out toward this worthwhile goal. If you think I can help in any other way, please let me know, I'll gladly do whatever I can and/or I'm empowered to. Thanks a lot for your work, you've all my sympathies for the decision you're asked to make. Cheers. PS I appreciate Cc:-s to lea...@d.o if you want to get my attention -- Stefano Zacchiroli -o- PhD in Computer Science \ PostDoc @ Univ. Paris 7 z...@{upsilon.cc,pps.jussieu.fr,debian.org} -<>- http://upsilon.cc/zack/ Quando anche i santi ti voltano le spalle, | . |. I've fans everywhere ti resta John Fante -- V. Caposella .......| ..: |.......... -- C. Adams
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