Steering Council meeting, 7 Sep 2026 (with Fellows)

Agenda

• DjangoCon US New Features discussion
• Using extras to package other tools
• Experimental features GSoC Project
• Fellows topics
  • Ping: CompositeField DEP
  • Status of Content Type Parsing DEP
• Case study blog posts
• Django usage telemetry/metrics

Action items

• Sovereign Tech Fund
  • Emma: Get one or more project(s) ready (maybe Admin or at least list of places to start)
  • Plan another meeting with Lexi once the above is done
• Tim: Teams Charters
  • Translations Team - Need to reach out to Claude
• Carlton: DEP 20
  • Final clean ups
  • Short sentence describing new release process
  • Short blog post draft with clear transition timeline statement.
• New Features improvements
  • Revisit the language around closing, so we can close things
  • Create a curated view of issues for people to participate in a high-impact area
  • Create new project board views with documentation/blog post with how to participate in new feature process
• Tim: Review Lexi’s email and forward along
• Fellows: Review suggested major features

Action Items Review

• DEP 20
  • Have the list of the last bits to implement to get it from accepted to final
• Lexi reached out regarding about sovereign tech fund via email

  • One of the available areas is Technical Debt Management – essentially hands-on engineering work aimed at reducing maintenance burden and improving long-term sustainability, with the work delivered as maintainer-ready contributions

  • The other major projects that were originally discussed either turned into GSoC or aren’t properly scoped for the sovereign tech fund.

DjangoCon US New Features discussion

• Major changes for 6.2
  • Big features that may in vicinity of finish lines:
    • https://github.com/django/django/pull/16905 moving a model between apps
    • https://github.com/django/django/pull/18805 multiline template tags
      • There were some issues in a test project that suggests it may be a bit further than we’d like for 6.2
      • Could potentially reduce scope
    • https://github.com/django/django/pull/21226 injectable comments into SQL for tracability (AI heavy)
    • https://github.com/django/django/pull/18863 Composite GFK support
    • https://github.com/django/django/pull/18332 expanding the messages API
    • https://github.com/django/django/pull/20336 initial filters on QuerySet classes
    • https://github.com/django/django/pull/16329 Embed raw queries as subqueries
  • Highlight/focus/attention:
    • Moving models between apps
      • Shai planning on working on during DotM
      • Emma has an django-devs mailing list for proposal for moving models between apps, it was a fairly small change
        • Premise was to be able to write migrations within the (models?) via contribute_to_class
        • https://stackoverflow.com/questions/24311993/how-to-add-a-new-field-to-a-model-with-new-django-migrations/27450550#27450550
    • Rate limiting
      • Needs a DEP
      • Need to identify what is the universal functionality we need, “the 80% solution”
      • Likely not a 6.2 release because there isn’t an agreed upon solution yet
    • Initial filters on QuerySet
      • Jacob: this seems reasonable
    • Fellows please review the list of features to see what’s close
  • Other features:
    • https://github.com/django/django/pull/21855 Added support for HTTP QUERY method
    • https://github.com/django/django/pull/16381 QuerySet.select_for_share()
    • https://github.com/django/django/pull/19298 Handle returning rows in update and bulk_update
  • Smaller features
    • https://github.com/django/django/pull/21847 Improving debug messaging for CSRF errors
    • https://github.com/django/django/pull/18468 Adding QuerySet.executed_queries
    • https://github.com/django/django/pull/19603 Partitioned cookies (AI heavy)
  • Proposed message 6.2 major feature check-in
    • It’s not necessary for us to have “major features” after big changes in 6.0 and 6.1
• Quarterly outreach to ask for attention in specific areas
  • Thoughts
    • Can we add a DSF sponsored email list?
      • The Board is working on a quarterly newsletter, but was sidelined for ED work
    • This would start as a blog post and forum post, until newsletter is created
  • Help filling out
    • Carlton will help after DotM
    • We should send this after DotM when things are usually better defined
• Django on the Prairie
  • Paolo convinced Frank to host!
  • Sprint days in Lawrence at the REVSYS office
  • Proposed time is in spring
  • Should we have guidelines on how to host these events?
    • Goal for DotM is to document how to host and run
    • Have start on Django specific bit here: https://github.com/django/new-features/blob/main/hosting-new-feature-review.md
    • On trademarking and using DjangoCon terminology: https://www.djangoproject.com/foundation/conferences/

Fellows

• FYI: we’re getting confident triage from agent-wielding beginners now. No action needed for now (hopefully)
  • When new tickets are created, we’re seeing LLM generated triage acceptance messages
  • No action needed for now since Fellows still review latest actions and can revert things as necessary

CompositeField DEP

• Ping: CompositeField DEP
• Simon and Lily have taken an initial look
  • Carlton: Looks amazing and what we need!
• Hopefully Simon can review during DotM
• Needs Steering Council review

Content Type Parsing DEP

• Status of Content Type Parsing DEP
• Chris M has put up a 3rd party package, but hasn’t marketed it
• Things have stalled out a bit
  • There were concerns about JSON parsing on views that didn’t have it before
  • This is a security concern for projects that update into new Django functionality
  • Could be a transitional setting to transition it
• We merged in the multipart classer attribute
• Can we dedicate Fellow time to this?
  • Yes
  • Jacob may spend time on this after DotM

Using extras to package other tools

• There’s the third-party package perspective from the GSoC project: https://github.com/django/deps/pull/118
• Could also be used to build commercial relationships, such as with Mongo, etc
  • Is there any hesitancy from packaging company sponsored packages with Django, assuming they’re a sponsor of Django?
  • Frank: This seems to make a lot of sense for databases
  • Carlton: Nick Pope did work on this in the past
    • Memcached, etc
  • Lily: Sounds good on the vendor extras
  • Emma: We need to discuss what this process would look like
    • This is likely a board and steering council process.
    • Tim: We can try to redirect the DEP to focus on existing extras rather than experimental
  • Django[experimental]
    • This seems like the best way to handle it

Experimental features GSoC Project

• Praful and Andy have things for folks to review
• https://github.com/django/deps/pull/118 Third-party packages and extras
• Experimental features as a third-party package
  • Repository
  • Discussion Thread
  • This could be something for 2028
• https://github.com/django/deps/pull/117 feature flags
  • Repository
  • Discussion Thread

Case Studies with Django projects

• Tim to start doing case study blog posts for projects using Django
• If folks have big, old, cool projects, let him know for future iterations

Django usage telemetry/metrics

• Tim’s been working on Django Probe idea on his own time
• Opt-in versus opt-out
  • This is a third party package, with toml file configuration
  • When collecting dependencies, only collect pypi dependencies
    • Need to look into private pypi
• Would need to be aware of blind spots this would this create
  • Deprecating something because it’s not used in this could just mean people who use it aren’t opted in
  • Some organizations are unable to respond to surveys or fill this out, but that doesn’t mean their usage isn’t warranted