A long time ago (I don’t remember exactly: years) I subscribed to the Python distutils-sig mailing list. And then I unsubscribed because it was noisy and not terribly fruitful.

Now, chasing down a Windows-related pip issue, I’ve come across it again and discovered that there’s a shed-load of useful work going on there. I had no idea that distribute (a fork of setuptools) & setuptools had [re]merged as of setuptools v0.7, and I’d lost sight of the many PEPs on naming, versioning, distribution formats and the like. I still haven’t worked out which is which, but at least certain of them seem to have reached the stage where they’re the point of reference for other discussions — not discussion points in their own right. There’s an initiative to get pip into the main Python distribution — which I also had no idea about.

I’m especially happy to see Paul Moore holding up the Windows end of things in discussions — thanks, Paul! Despite our both being UK-based [*] and Windows types and long-term Python users, we’ve never actually met AFAIK.

I’ve resubscribed now and I hope to be able to contribute in some small way.

[*] I’m fairly sure — and he did recently make a reference to Gunga Din, which is something I’ve never heard outside this country.