[Python-Dev] What can we do about dealing with the Demo directory?

Brett Cannon bac at OCF.Berkeley.EDU
Sun Jun 27 01:03:53 EDT 2004


While reading through the "Extending/Embedding Python" tutorial (no 
snickering; I need to implement a type from scratch for my thesis and I 
figured I might as well read the tutorial for once), I noticed a mention 
of Demo/embed/demo.c .  Having heard the comments about how outdated the 
Demo directory was(I think the last thread was by AMK), I decided to 
poke around.

Some of it is fairly old.  The README, for instance, mentions a Contrib 
directory for stuff.  And the classes/Date.py file mentions the creation 
of a generator... using __getitem__ (took me a second to realize that I 
was not going nuts in not noticing a 'yield' statement).

Maintenance of the directory has come up before and has seems to die 
every time (which I don't blame anyone for; I myself never stepped 
forward to help).  But if it is going just site there, perhaps we should 
  consider getting rid of it?  Cool snippets of code can be grabbed from 
all over the Net (take the Cookbook, for instance), and so having it 
with the code is not as important as I am sure it was when the directory 
was created.

Or at least we could prune it down.  I can see usage from 
Demo/newmetaclasses/ since metaclasses can be hard to grasp without 
example code.  But couldn't we remove the Demo/metaclasses/ directory 
for instance?

I am partially doing this so as to see if people care enough to bother 
putting an announcement in the python-dev Summary (maybe even 
python-announce) to try to get the community as a whole to help update 
the files.  Maybe everyone on this list could adopt one module and bring 
it up to date or something.  Just seems like something should happen 
with it, and if it is just going to sit we could at least prune it.

-Brett



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