ParallelSSH governance and next steps

[enkore]

The current situation

• It unfortunately looks like @pkittenis is incommunicado since late 2022.
• I am an GitHub org member, but don't have admin access
  • Therefore nothing can be merged into master (a protected branch)
• Only Panos has permissions on the PyPI packages
  • No releases can be made to PyPI

What has been done so far

• I've tried contacting Panos on every email address I could find (seven different ones).
  • Unfortunately no response so far (hope he is alright)
• I squatted @parallel-ssh on GitHub in case we need to migrate to a new GH org
• I applied for a parallel-ssh org on PyPI which is pending as of this writing
• I created next branches in some of the repositories which can be used as a staging branch in the mean time

Next steps

• GitHub has no process for this if the owners of an org didn't make preparations
• PyPI has a process (PEP 541), which takes at least a few months. The upside here is that usually it's more or less "random" people trying to do this process, here we might have a bit of a headstart since I'm an org member

The main motivator for getting this unstuck is that the base packages (ssh-python and ssh2-python) need new releases to cope with Python 3.12 breakage.

CC @JacobCallahan @pletnes @pbrezina @McTonderski @ogajduse @Gauravtalreja1 @omkarkhatavkar

[JacobCallahan]

@enkore Thanks for leading this effort. It's unfortunate that we're in this position, but it does seem like we have some potential people willing to keep things going.

I think one thing that will definitely help with this in the future is documenting update processes and modernizing the build/release systems.

Luckily, Python's API is typically pretty stable and we're now at a 1 year Y-stream release cadence, so maintaining these packages shouldn't require a lot of time.

[enkore]

Pinging some downstream packages (according to github) to make them aware of this. Please excuse the noise if I included false positives in here.

https://github.com/persimmon-ai-labs/adept-inference @mtensor
https://github.com/marsupialtail/quokka @marsupialtail
https://github.com/BaguaSys/bagua @NOBLES5E
https://github.com/thelastpickle/cassandra-medusa @adejanovski @rzvoncek
https://github.com/scylladb/scylla-cluster-tests @fruch
https://github.com/nocproject/noc @aversant
https://github.com/carlmontanari/scrapli @carlmontanari

[fruch]

Thanks for the heads up

We are blocked on python 3.12 for our own libraries as well, so it would take a while till we'll be hitting this.

[enkore]

PyPI has a process (PEP 541), which takes at least a few months. The upside here is that usually it's more or less "random" people trying to do this process, here we might have a bit of a headstart since I'm an org member

I've prepared an application for this and will submit it once the eligibility date (2023-12-03) passes (unless we hear back from Panos of course).

[rzvoncek]

Hello and thanks for reaching out! We're not blocked by this right now, but we're very happy you're looking into this nonetheless!

[pletnes]

We're running 3.10 instead of 3.11 because of this, but it's not really an issue for us, for now. But python versions EOL much faster these days so it's a good idea to get started.

[JacobCallahan]

@enkore I took a look through the issues you filed in this project and there are a number of things that need to be done to get this back in shape. I'm more than willing to jump in an take on a good amount of this, but coordination is a bit cumbersome via github alone.

If you'd like, we may be able to setup some kind of community video call with anyone interested in participating or just observing. If so, I can host a google meet.

[pkittenis]

I'll take a look at releasing updates packages soon.

[JacobCallahan]

@pkittenis Are you able to give us an update on the new releases? If this is something you need help with, we're here!

[McTonderski]

Hey @pkittenis Do you need any help with new release ? Let us know!

[JacobCallahan]

@enkore We may be in the same situation since there has been no activity.

[pbrezina]

@pkittenis @enkore Bump. Is there any progress on the release?

[ulidtko]

@pkittenis ping

[ulidtko]

had better UX with pip install fabric https://docs.fabfile.org — has a CLI, and loads ~/.ssh/config out of the box

[JacobCallahan]

@ulidtko Since this has largely died in this organization @enkore has created a successor org over at https://github.com/parallel-ssh/ that we hope will keep these projects going in the longer term.
If you just need ssh2-python for python 3.12, then I published my fork to pypi as the ugly-named ssh2-python312.

I've also started a side project (excuse to use Rust) that may do most of what you want (but no built-in ssh config functionality (yet?)): https://github.com/JacobCallahan/Hussh/