Maintenance request

[sterliakov]

I plan to apply for a W3F maintenance grant for substrate-interface — would you be open to reviewing and merging significant changes during next months? I would love to modernize the workflows and DX (e.g. by introducing pre-commit), ensure reliable static checks (fix existing lint violations and enable ore relevant rules, perhaps replacing flake8 with ruff to have them available), add automated code formatting (ruff or black), increase type hints coverage (and ensure they pass mypy and pyright), and resolve several high-priority tickets involving runtime crashes.

This project is actively used by many developers (250k+ monthly downloads as per PyPIStats). Unfortunately, the maintenance seems to be stale or delayed: unit tests are failing, lint violations are simply silenced in CI, open tickets describing runtime crashes keep accumulating. As indicated in #412, some organizational changes have taken place, but no active development is scheduled for the foreseeable future. The amount of package users suggests that more urgent actions might be necessary to meet developers needs.

If accepting multiple significant contributions does not align with your vision, I'm ready to maintain a fork deployed to PyPI under alternative name and then merge it back when your team has sufficient resources to go through such a merge.

[emielsebastiaan]

This sound like a good idea. Let me discuss with the team. Our internal priorities are with delivering JAM, that said this repo is of strategic importance in the near future. I'll get back to you early next week. 🙏🏻

[sterliakov]

Thanks, looking forward! I understand that your priorities may vary, and the resources are obviously limited. Please don't see my request as something diminishing or neglecting your efforts and efforts of your contributors, I only want to improve the ecosystem:)

[sterliakov]

Hi @emielsebastiaan, just a gentle ping:)

[emielsebastiaan]

Hello Stanislav,

We are willing to review an merge community contributions through PRs. Any community contribution that meets quality standards will be eligible to be merged.

Like I mentioned before our priorities are currently with delivering PyJAMaz (Python Implementation of JAM). We view Python-Polkadot-SDK (FKA: py-substrate-interface) as a strategic piece of functionality for interaction with the broader Polkadot ecosystem (Hub) and we plan to get to a proper roadmap and planning for its development in 2026 (once the dust has settled on JAM).
We currently provide support for immediate and urgent issues while using Python-Polkadot-SDK.

You mentioned you are planning to apply for a W3F Maintenance grant for this repository.
We have good relations with W3F and Parity Technologies (@KarimJedda), I recommend you write a proposal and include a clear outline of the things you intend to be working on. If you include us in the review process we will review and I suppose this will increase your chances of getting a grant approved. We look forward to your proposal. Reach out to me by email at: emiel@jamdot.tech.

Cheers,
Emiel

[semuelle]

Already watching, @emielsebastiaan. :) Here is the proposal: w3f/Grants-Program#2571, feel free to comment so the grants committee can see it.
We always look for approval from maintainers, or, ideally, a handover when it comes to maintenance grants. However, if you are willing to review contributions, I'm happy to give it a try. If, for any reason, this does not work out, we can cancel the grant any time.