I just closed 35706 as a duplicate of this one (the titles are basically identical, which feels like a good hint ;) )

It seems that the disagreement about the design is fundamentally a disagreement between a "quick, painful but complete fix" and "slow, careful improvements with a transition period". Both are valid approaches, and since Victor is putting actual effort in right now he gets to "win", but I do think we can afford to move faster.

It seems the main people who will suffer from the pain here are embedders (who are already suffering pain) and the core developers (who explicitly signed up for pain!). But without knowing the end goal, we can't accelerate.

Currently PEP 432 is the best description we have, and it looks like Victor has been heading in that direction too (deliberately? I don't know :) ). But it seems like a good time to review it, replace the "here's the current state of things" with "here's an imaginary ideal state of things" and fill the rest with "here are the steps to get there without breaking the world".

By necessity, it touches a lot of people's contributions to Python, but it also has the potential to seriously improve even more people's ability to _use_ Python (for example, I know an app that you all would recognize the name of who is working on embedding Python right now and would _love_ certain parts of this side of things to be improved).

Nick - has the steering council been thinking about ways to promote collaborative development of ideas like this? I'm thinking an Etherpad style environment for the brainstorm period (in lieu of an in-person whiteboard session) that's easy for us all to add our concerns to, that can then be turned into something more formal.

Nick, Victor, Eric, (others?) - are you interested in having a virtual whiteboard session to brainstorm how the "perfect" initialization looks? And probably a follow-up to brainstorm how to get there without breaking the world? I don't think we're going to get to be in the same room anytime before the language summit, and it would be awesome to have something concrete to discuss there.