forge.python.org status update

[Nick Coghlan]

Hi folks,

TL;DR: the forge.python.org proposal in PEP 474 has been stalled for a
while, but I expect activity on it to pick up again between now and
the end of October.

-----------

Sorry for the lack of progress/updates on the forge.python.org idea in
recent months, but I started a new Fedora developer experience role at
Red Hat, Donald Stufft started a new upstream Python packaging
ecosystem focused role on the OpenStack team at HP, and Brett Cannon
started a new tools development job at Microsoft, so the key players
have all been rather distracted of late :)

For the benefit of folks that haven't heard about the forge.python.org
concept yet, it's a proposal I put together a while ago to have a
proper VCS repo management system hosted at forge.python.org. Since
GitHub, BitBucket and GitLab exist, this wouldn't be a general purpose
hosting platform, but rather targeted specifically at CPython and
closely related projects (like the developer guide and PEPs repo).

My proposal (https://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0474/) is based on
Kallithea, as I'd like us to have something that offers the simplicity
of GitHub/BitBucket style pull request workflows by default, but also
offers the option of enabling a more complex Gerrit style change
review process within the target repo that allows maintainers to
handle the final cleanup pass rather than having to ask contributors
to make those changes and resubmit, or to handle that step in the
process using offline tools.

There isn't anything out there that currently offers that, but I
believe Kallithea could *potentially* offer it with appropriate
updates to allow acceptance of changes online, in addition to the
current online review support.

This email is just an FYI for the list that I now have an updated
target date from Brett to produce a proof of concept for him to work
with: October 31st.

I'm traveling for the next couple of weeks, so I'll hopefully be able
to start iterating on this idea starting in late August.

Regards,
Nick.

P.S. Donald's competing proposal is to migrate away from Mercurial
entirely to git hosting on GitHub, and then set up a Phabricator
instance for additional workflow flexibility:
https://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0481/

-- 
Nick Coghlan   |   ncoghlan at gmail.com   |   Brisbane, Australia