Mentor conda maintainers by packaging practitioners

[jezdez]

In working to upskill the current maintainers of conda-build with real-world usage of conda-build, we should start building bridges between the various stakeholders and report back here on progress.

[jezdez]

@kenodegard @beeankha I think you mentioned that you're interested to dive into conda-build a little, do you mind being assigned to this to make sure we're following up on it?

[jezdez]

@kenodegard I'm thinking if the conversations between @mbargull and @kenodegard could be the start of this ticket? Who else would be great at mentoring conda maintainers?

[jezdez]

@kenodegard @beeankha Do you feel like you're making progress on this?

[beeankha]

@jezdez Yes, I feel like progress is being made on this; we've been meeting regularly with @ryanskeith and will most likely be expanding the learning sessions to more stakeholders soon (we wanted to keep things small at first so the meetings wouldn't be overwhelming).

Below are some PRs that got filed during our learning sessions, just to give you an idea of the things we're already doing to get into conda-build's internals and try to improve/clean things up:

• Remove unnecessary reassignments and unused vars #4790
• Some minor code cleanup #4791
• create_test.py: Add type hints and refactor to use pathlib #4826

[jezdez]

Do you want to keep us up-to-date here or should we close this?

[beeankha]

I think there's enough momentum re: conda-build learning to be able to close this issue!

[ryanskeith]

I agree. We are making slow and steady progress.

[jezdez]

Sounds great, thank you!