On 13Feb2020 0156, Benjamin Peterson wrote:
On Wed, Feb 12, 2020, at 08:22, mailer@app.tempr.email wrote:
I've just been looking through the multiprocessing module and open issues and wondered why there were some small bugs/patches not being fixed/merged. Is this the "normal" patch cycle? Does it take years for bugs to get fixed in Python, even though patches are submitted? Just asking, I realize this sounds very negative, but I don't mean to be criticizing. Doing volunteer work myself, I understand that time is valuable and not always available. But I would have thought that there was no shortage of volunteers for Python.
Sadly, that is not that case.
The challenge is that the final review/merge steps require *trusted* volunteers, not just anyone with a bit of time. Anything that actually becomes part of Python is going to impact millions of people, so we have a responsibility to take that seriously and account for many more aspects than simply "does this fix my problem". As a result, volunteers have to develop a reputation before they are given permissions to sign off on changes by themselves, which becomes a bottleneck in taking on new volunteers. But it's also tough to build up a reputation when there's nobody to review your work, so the bottleneck becomes a cycle. Unlike a business, we don't have legal protection/recourse for bad decisions. When things break, other volunteers just have to stand up and cop the blame on behalf of the whole team. So we all stake our reputations on every new core developer, which also slows down the process. (FWIW, this is the same feedback I posted on that survey about hiring developers. "Sufficiently financially motivated" can be a reason to trust someone, but maybe not, and many in our community see it as a very good reason to openly *distrust* someone...) Cheers, Steve