Infrastructure committee moves forward with Roundup as the issue tracker for Python

In a previous post we pointed out that the Infrastructure committee had come to a recommendation for a new issue tracker for Python development. As part of that recommendation we stated that if enough volunteer administrators stepped forward to help administer a tracker installation the recommendation would switch from JIRA to Roundup. I am happy to report that more than enough volunteers stepped forward! Four admins (Paul DuBois, Erik Forsberg, Stefan Seefeld, and Michael Twomey) have been chosen to initially lead the handling of the tracker. We have also accepted a generous offer made by Upfront Systems to host the tracker. Our next steps are to begin planning out how to administer the installation, what we want from the tracker, and how to migrate off of SourceForge. These discussions will take place on the tracker-discuss mailing list to make sure that the tracker meets the needs of the Python development team. Thanks to all of those people who came forward to volunteer for the tracker to make all of this come together!

Python 2.4.4 released

Today release manager Anthony Baxter announced:

On behalf of the Python development team and the Python community, I'm happy to announce the release of Python 2.4.4.

Python 2.4.4 is a bug-fix release. While Python 2.5 is the latest version of Python, we're making this release for people who are still running Python 2.4. This is the final planned release from the Python 2.4 series. Future maintenance releases will be in the 2.5 series, beginning with 2.5.1.

The new release can be downloaded from the Python 2.4.4 page.

September PSF Board Meeting Minutes Available

Minutes of a Regular Meeting of the Board of Directors of the Python Software Foundation, September 18, 2006

What's the point of Planet Python?

One of the PSF's servers hosts planet.python.org, which collects postings from a long list of weblogs and displays the most recent ones. (Not to be confused with www.planetpython.org, which does the same thing but was doing it first. www.planetpython.org is run by Ryan Phillips and has a slightly different list of weblogs.)

Right now I'm the only maintainer of the list of weblogs. People occasionally send e-mail to <webmaster at python.org> asking for their feed to be added or moved. I read planet.python.org myself, and if someone notes they're abandoning a weblog or moving it, I make that change too. The editorial decision is sort of random on my part; there's no stated policy about it. Recent events make me think it's time to be more explicit about the rules.

Last week I changed the feed for Phillip J. Eby's weblog, from his full weblog feed to his programming-related feed, which is a subset of posts from his full weblog. Phillip sent in a note pushing back against this change, suggesting that he gets a significant number of readers for his non-Python postings through planet.python.org; this means that some Planet Python readers like these non-Python posts.

Back in 2003 when projects first started running Planet aggregators (Planet GNOME was one of the first), programmer weblogs were mostly focused on what-I-did-today with the odd digression. Reading a Planet therefore let you see all the activity in a particular development community: what's being developed? what's getting committed? what's being discussed?

Today weblogs have more digressions -- photos, political griping, cutesy memes, here-are-10-songs posts -- and Planets therefore contain all sorts of off-topic things. This isn't necessarily bad -- it can be interesting to see what your fellow developers have as other interests. But is it what people want? I'd like to see some discussion of this question, whether in the comments or on your own weblogs.

Question: should Planet Python be "posts from Python programmers" or "Python-related posts from Python programmers"? I've always leaned toward the latter view and chosen feeds with this in mind, but not everyone has a Python-specific category in their weblog and the selection of posts is therefore very imperfect. Should I try to be stricter about this?

Infrastructure committee recommends a new bug tracker for Python

Brett Cannon, chair of the infrastructure commitee, has posted the committee's recommendation for a new bug tracker.

The PSF thanks everyone who set up a bug tracker and performed a trial import of Python's bug database -- a considerable amount of effort on their part.