Re: Status of the python-dev task

[Joey Hess <joey@kitenet.net>]

Jérôme Marant wrote:
>   According to Joey Hess, it seems that the python-dev needs
>   someone to maintain it.

Well, the best maintainer would probably (presumably) be the
maintainer[1] of task-pthon-dev. I'm going to go through and contact the
maintainers of the task packages indiviually and work this stuff out.

> This is a very long list and I'm not sure all of them should
> be put in a single task, for few reasons:
> 
> - there are both python and python2 package.
> - some of them are not used a lot.

I seriously doubt that they all belong in any task. If we had a perl
task, it would be *insane* to make it include lib*-perl. Knowing
little of python, I can only draw an analogy.

Our guidelines include the following:

  Care should be taken when adding new tasks to ensure that the new task
  is suitably generic -- it should be something of value to a large number
  (at least 10%) of our users. It must not perform the same general purpose
  as some other existing task. It must contain packages that are the ones in
  most common use, and software that is of the best perceived quality.

> As long as there is a speration between python and python2,
> I would propose to create a second task called python2-dev
> that would contain all python2 specific packages.
> (I still don't know what was stated about the separation, so
>  does my proposal make sense?)
> 
> Now, some questions:
> - what packages are not worth having?
> - should we split the task in smaller ones?

You have to run new tasks by myself, Anthony Towns and Randolph Chung right
now. The guidelines and working consensus we have is emphatically against
splitting up tasks (see above), and the set of tasks we've settled on was
chosen after a lot of consideration to be at the right level of granularity
(though we're certianly open to interesting new tasks if they meet the
guildlines). If the python/python2 split is a problem, the maintainer of this
task basically has to decide if it will offer python, python2, or both.

Another thing to bear in mind is that the new system makes it reasonably
easy to select a task thus selecting all the packages in it, and then drop
down to per-package selection and remove or change some of the selections,
before anything is installed.

-- 
±see shy jo

[1] Hi David. The only task-pthon package I can find is in potato.