Future of Pew?

Firstly, I want to thank you, @berdario, for creating this project. I’ve been happily using it for years.

In the mean time, I’ve also became the maintainer of the Fedora package.

Seeing there hasn’t been any new commit into master since Apr 16, 2019 and the last pull request that was opened was #214 on Aug 1, 2019, I’m curious if there is any interest in keeping the project alive?

Please, don’t take this question as a demand, but rather a sincere inquiry. Thanks!

[pfmoore]

@berdario Sorry, I don’t think I ever posted my thoughts. Given @tjanez comment here and the changes to CI in that PR, I’d like to revisit the question of where you see pew going.

Personally, I’d like to do the following:

1. Support Python 3.6+ only, and move to a more aggressive policy of only supporting Python versions that are still supported by the core Python team.
2. Switch to Github Actions for CI.
3. Drop support for nix, as the tests seem to be failing and there’s no-one who knows enough about nix to do anything about it.
4. Stop supporting installing Python (the Pythonz integration) and focus on just being a virtual environment manager. Again, it’s not obvious to me who is available to support that code if it goes wrong, so not making promises we can’t keep seems better than having stuff that could fail at any time and block everything.
5. Move away from the (IMO weird) virtualenvwrapper-inspired command names, to more natural names (see #163, which would be first on the list for me). We could leave the old names as aliases, at least for a period.
6. Tidy up the codebase, for example actually removing the nix/pythonz code, rather than just meaving it as “unsupported but present for now”.

The key thing for me is to get a critical mass of people who have the time and interest to work on pew, and focus on features and things that they are comfortable with, and interested in, supporting.

#214 does the first two of the above changes, and I’d love to merge it¹, but I don’t want it to be a one-off thing with no real follow-up. If the reality is that the project is in “maintenance only” mode, then I’d prefer to accept that and move on (with the implication being that we’re OK with people² who want a more dynamic project creating a fork/successor).

¹ To merge, someone would need to switch off Appveyor. I don’t know if anyone other than the appveyor project owner can do that… ² I may be one of those people, I honestly haven’t decided yet whether I want to be lead maintainer/owner of such a project, as opposed to “just” a team member.

[berdario]

First of all, apologies for the lack of an update.

as usual, life happened (moved home 4 times in 3 years, among other things)… and replying to github PRs and issues was definitely on my TODO list

though overdue by 344 days 🤦‍♂️

I was historically pretty bearish on dropping support for Python2 in Pew, since Pew should make it easier to be used also on older distro or environments where the system-level Python is not yet Python3…

But as of a couple of months ago, pip dropped support for Python2: https://pip.pypa.io/en/stable/news/#id1

hence, there’s not really any point in us keeping support for it… so that’s 👍 from me on dropping it

about Nix travis CI failures… I’d look at them myself, but now is not the best time for me 😕

I’ve historically been pretty liberal in adding collaborators to this repo, but I noticed that tjanez hadn’t yet been added… that is now fixed (in fact, this update was triggered by an email sent directly to me… )

Thanks for stepping up. I can also grant you access on pypi to publish updates