"TW" == Thomas Wouters <thomas@xs4all.net> writes:
[GvR:]
So that relegates us at PythonLabs to a number of things: coding new modules (boring), or trying to improve performance of the virtual machine (equally boring, and difficult to boot), or fixing bugs (did I mention boring? :-).
TW> How can you say this ? Okay, so *fixing* bugs isn't terribly TW> exciting, but hunting them down is one of the best sports TW> around. Same for optimizations: rewriting the code might be TW> boring (though if you are a fast typist, it usually doesn't take TW> long enough to get boring :) but thinking them up is the fun TW> part. TW> But who said PythonLabs had to do all the work ? You guys didn't TW> do all the work in 2.0->2.1, did you ? Okay, so most of the TW> major features are written by PythonLabs, and most of the TW> decisions are made there, but there's no real reason for TW> it. Most of the work I did for Python 2.0 was fixing bugs. It was a lot of fairly tedious but necessary work. I have always imagined that this was work that most people wouldn't do unless they were paid to do it. (python-dev seems to have a fair number of exceptions, though.) Working on major new features has a lot more flash, so I imagine that volunteers would be more inclined to help. Neil's work on GC or yours on augmented assignment are examples. There's nothing that says we have to do all the work. In fact, I imagine we'll continue to collectively spend a lot of time on maintenance issues. We get paid to do it, and we get to hack on Zope and ZODB the rest of the time, which is also a lot of fun. Jeremy