This was posted as an email to python-dev.
Since I signed up for the python-dev mailing list way back in June 2002, there seems to be a cycle where we as a group come to a realization that our current software development process has not kept up with modern practices and could stand for an update. For me this was first shown when we moved from SourceForge to our own infrastructure, then again when we moved from Subversion to Mercurial (I led both of these initiatives, so it's somewhat a tradition/curse I find myself in this position yet again). And so we again find ourselves at the point of realizing that we are not keeping up with current practices and thus need to evaluate how we can improve our situation.
Now it should be realized that we have two sets of users of our development process: contributors and core developers (the latter whom can play both roles). If you take a rough outline of our cu