The thread on PQM has now grown multiple points and it becoming a little hard to follow since it is pulling in a bunch of ideas not directly related to a PQM system, so I am going to attempt to summarize the points brought up here. SUMMARY: it's great we are talking about this, but I think this would be better to discuss after 2.6/3.0 is out the door.

What are our dev rules, and are we following them?

Obviously this is all pointing out the fact that Python's popularity has grown such that the amount of hours available from core developers is far exceeded by what we really need to keep stuff going the way we have been doing things. Short of tossing out commit privileges like candy on Halloween outside of a grade school, something really should change.

We already have some things in place that do help. Requiring tests has helped catch issues on the buildbots and made sure we didn't repeat the same mistakes. We also all know better than to introduce anything major during the beta cycle, but the thought of having some solution for multi-core processing was too tempting so we ignored general practice for the multiprocessing module and now we are paying for it late in the release cycle. We also want everyone to run the ENTIRE testing suite before a commit is made, but I am sure we are all guilty of skipping a full '-u all' run when the change is thought to be minor (and I know I never run with random test order like the buildbots).

Code reviews

One suggestion on how to improve the situation has been code reviews. Ideas have ranged from code reviews for everything to "who needs code reviews?" Doing a code review on everything will obviously lower the bandwidth on committed code and we already don't have that many people who review pre-existing patches as it is. But some review should probably be done for anything significant. I am leery of suggesting we go with guidelines based on line count, but probably anything that takes more than an afternoon to implement should probably get a code review. And yes, working in branches would help with this.

Buildbots

We also have the buildbots which are handy when you are trying to fix something that is multi-platform, but otherwise they are just email generators. I think we really need to work on fix the various flaky tests so that false-positive failures stop occurring and leading to people ignoring the buildbot emails. And I personally like Christian's idea of a single summary email at the end of the day of buildbots that are still failing that goes to everyone potentially involved in the breakage along with to a mailing list.

PQM

There is also the PQM suggestion to make sure we always at least have some general sanity in the code base. But a PQM system would probably only work once the test suite is not flaky anymore as having some typo in a comment be rejected because test_kqueue failed again is not going to go over well with most people. And that also goes for OS-specific failures on a platform I am not running on. Honestly the PQM system probably wouldn't be necessary if people just ran the entire test suite before a checkin. And if people never checked in if there was any failure (related to their code or not) we would probably get the test suite cleaned up a lot faster as well.

How are we going to solve this?

I think a thorough discussion on how we have been handling development is needed. We all want to continue to enjoy developing for Python and we want it to continue to be a high-quality project. Because of this we might have to compromise on what we might do if this were a business with paid positions, but I don't think it will be anything major. And I think the 2.6/3.0 development cycle has shown we really should be changing something to make our lives easier.

But I honestly think this discussion should wait until after we go final with 2.6/3.0. Once that happens and we are all not running around trying to get a release out, then we should start from the ground up and re-evaluate what we need to change. That includes the workflow in the issue tracker, how the buildbots are used, what our expected best practices are, cleaning up the test suite, how serious we are about moving to a distributed VCS, whether we want a PQM, do we want code reviews, etc. But I really think we should be putting the time in now to b3 and working towards hitting final before we delve into this lengthy conversation.

And yes, I am willing to help help with all of this through PEPs, documenting what are guidelines are for new developers, doing stuff through the infrastructure committee, etc. (although importlib will be finished first, although not necessarily committed if our commit practices change, since I had to miss 3.0 in order to get PEP 3108 done and I refuse to miss another release).

-Brett