Need a release manager

[Armin Rigo]

Hi all,

**CFFI needs a release manager, or it won't be distributed with wheels
any more.**

Please read on for details.

The diversity of platforms is growing again, nowadays. That's a good
thing, but it makes more work for making and distributing wheels.
It's work that I cannot do any more myself. CFFI is very much stable
and not really changing any longer, but new platforms or new Pythons
on these platforms keep showing up, and sadly there is no one-click
button that keeps working year after year. Building a complicated
build process isn't worth it if parts need to be rethought every six
months---because six month is also the typical release frequency of
CFFI nowadays.

Add to this the limitations of pypi, which makes it very hard to do
incremental releases: we can't release whatever wheel is current for
each platform, update just that wheel if it was found to be bogus, and
not update all other wheels if the fix in the source code was only
relevant on one uncommon platform.

In light of all of this, here is what will happen now:

1. I will continue to maintain the source code of CFFI for new
platforms (which often means accepting pull requests, but with further
tweaks to make sure it continues to work on existing platforms).

2. I may or may not issue pypi source releases myself, depending on
the 4th point.

3. I will not issue any more wheels on pypi myself.

4. We are looking for a release manager ready to take the lead. If he
wants he can recruit maintainers for specific platforms, of course.
He'll get full access to the two systems (Azure and Travis) currently
set up to do each half of the job. He can do whatever he likes to
make pypi happy. He doesn't have to (but he can if he wants to)
handle other duties like updating the CFFI documentation site, writing
the whatsnew, and other things apart from doing the wheels.

So, further source code releases will occur, and it should build on
random platforms, but no wheels will be released until a release
manager is found.

Thank you for your patience and sorry about that! I want to move on
to other things now.


A bientôt,

Armin Rigo