On Mon, Mar 2, 2009 at 4:22 PM, "Martin v. Löwis"
<martin@v.loewis.de> wrote:
> Would whoever is responsible for IDLE please take a look at the patches
> I submitted for Python 2 & 3 [tracker IDs 5233 and 5234 respectively].
> These change the behavior of IDLE so that IDLESTARTUP or PYTHONSTARTUP
> files are executed with each restart. This allows loading frequently
> used packages, personal utilities, etc. automatically at each restart. I
> consider this a very important problem in IDLE, especially when using it
> to teach.
Just to put this into perspective: I personally don't see that as a very
important problem. I didn't know IDLESTARTUP existed, and I use
PYTHONSTARTUP only for the command line (to setup readline and history).
I think there are many more open issues that are *way* more important.
Martin,
No disrespect intended but I don't see how this puts things into perspective. I'm writing to you from the annual computer science education conference (SIGCSE) where Python is clearly gaining ground as an important language for teaching computer science.
It seems logical to me that the committers are high powered Python users who don't think much about Python being used in education. I'm just as frustrated as Mitchell about a patch for displaying ranges and dict_keys/values objects in a more user friendly way. I submitted this patch during the 3.0 alpha phase and it is still sitting around. For me this is a serious problem, but I can understand how it seems pretty minor to others, who are not teaching new programmers.
So what is the solution? The obvious solution is for one of us, that is someone who uses Python as an education tool, to become a committer. This seems problematic to me. Although I'm willing to be a committer, and I'm confident I have the development skills necessary to be a committer I don't have the time to develop the resume of patches needed to earn that privilege.
It would be nice if we could find some solution to this.
Brad
This is not to say that the patch should not applied - I haven't even
looked at it. It's just a warning that, if no other committer feels this
is as important as you fell it is, it may not be committed reviewed and
committed before 3.1.
Regards,
Martin