Tomorrow is the Language Summit, yeepee. :)

The package and distribution part of the Summit is going to be great since we have key people coming up.

zc.buildout and pip leaders (Jim Fulton and Ian Bicking) will be present, and many others. I'll be representing Distutils, since I am its current maintainer. Unfortunately Philip Eby (setuptools) can't make it, but he should be reachable via IRC (I am trying to set something up for tomorrow).

Anyway, one of the goal of the Summit is to validate the new features and enhancements we want to introduce in Distutils and PyPI. It's important to make sure they play well with third-party tools like zc.buildout, setuptools and pip. We also need to make sure these tools will evolve in the same direction in the future.

We have reached a point in Python where we need to concentrate all the packaging effort to build a common standard in the standard library, because it is badly needed.

Here's a draft of the slides I will present tomorrow, during the first 5/10 minutes, as a session leader:
- Packaging Survey results overview - Topics to discuss
- setting up an organized network of mirrors (see PEP 381) - discuss about other PyPI enhancements - improve the package installation / uninstallation (see PEP 376) - discuss the package dependencies problem and see if we can come up with a PEP - discuss the multiple version problem and see if we can come up with a PEP - discuss the isolated environment vs the OS vendor approach and see what can be done to improve their coexistence.

Summit schedule:
- 13:20 -> 13:30 : presentation - 13:30 -> 14:30 : discussions/work in small groups - 14:30 -> 14:50 : "tour de table" - 14:50 -> 15:10 : break - 15:10 -> onwards: sprint !

I am not sure about the 'work in small group' part yet, because I don't know how many people will show up, and what people will want to focus on.