Steering Council meeting, 1 Sep 2025 (with Fellows)

Agenda

• Team to WG Structure update
• Ecosystem page
• Django on the Med
• Our Q4 Season
  • DEP 10
  • Roadmap
• Fellows:
  • General catch up
  • Django 6.0
  • Django 6.1

Action items

• Tim: Preliminary review of DEP 10 adjustments
• Tim: Create PR to add experimental or similar section to ecosystem page
• Carlton: Add Jacob Walls to meeting invite
• Emma: Draft blog post on 6.x Features
• Frank: Write blog post about packages eco-system
• All: Start process of reviewing new-features ideas, propose an action and request feedback
• All: Collect preferences for 6.1 release [and now Django on the Med roadmap]
• Sovereign Tech Fund
  • Emma: Get one or more project(s) ready (maybe Admin or at least list of places to start)
  • Check with fellows if billing scheme is ok
  • Plan another meeting with Lexi once the above is done

Team to WG Structure update

• Working on finalizing a new PR with Jeff for the Security team.
• Need to get feedback from SC and Security team next

Ecosystem page

• Slow progress on PR to add ecosystem page to search
  • https://github.com/django/djangoproject.com/pull/2136
• Track interest on experimental section discussion in SC Forum section

Django on the Med

• We want to hold a “Roadmap Workshop” — to help advance and elaborate key ideas.
  • “What are your hit list items? Can you give some breakdown of that?”
  • Will be asking Thibaud if he’s coming to run a similar roadmap session
  • If Thibaud isn’t there, we’ll ask for a template
  • If Steering Council members have features or ideas to bring up in roadmap discussion
  • Goal is to come out of the sprints with more elaborate documents to help people to work on things

Our Q4 Season

DEP 10

• Start on at sprints of DCUS
• Try to default to yes with oversight

Roadmap

• Django on the Med
• Need to revisit our new issues board
  • Lily and Emma are going to meet to discuss things

Fellows:

General catch up

• General warning that both Natalia and Jacob will be at DjangoCon, and Sarah will be away, so only minimum work will be done during that time.

Django 6.0

• https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/dev/releases/6.0/ Plus django tasks
• There’s a lot on the Fellows’ plate
  • Feature freeze is coming up
  • The next two weeks has zero Fellow availability outside security and release blockers
• Django Tasks is being reviewed by Fellows
  • Everything else is being pushed
  • Maybe autofield will be reviewed?
• There is flexibility in release dates reminder
• The feature freeze can be done and then the release delayed if needed reminder

Django 6.1

• Jacob is the release manager
• Features
  • Async database connection and cursors: https://github.com/django/django/pull/18408
    • May be a good 3rd party package
    • This is a good thread which goes over what is worthwhile to make async and the maintenance challenges we need to juggle with it: https://forum.djangoproject.com/t/is-dep009-async-capable-django-still-relevant/30132/
    • It also references a discussion on the Python forum that we’re not alone in finding adding async to a sync-first package challenging: How can async support dispatch between sync and async variants of the same code?
    • Experimental DEP may not be helpful here as it wouldn’t allow us to change an API in a .X release cycle
  • Model fetch modes: https://github.com/django/django/pull/17554
    • Django-seal
    • Django-auto-prefetch (other 3rd party package)
    • Mature
  • Database level cascading options: https://github.com/django/django/pull/16851
    • Needs refresh and re-push
  • Moving models between apps: https://github.com/django/django/pull/16905
    • Needs refresh and re-push
• Should try to be more ambitious with the Django on the Med roadmapping to identify next features for 6.1 and 6.2