On Thu, Mar 5, 2009 at 10:53 AM, Brad Miller <millbr02@luther.edu> wrote:
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.
Or... IDLE could be taken out from Python. Tkinter is following the same path too, sadly. My hope is that by removing IDLE from Python it would bring new developers that are not necessary python developers (by this I mean developers of python itself). I changed IDLE quite a bit last year, but I'm not sure if anyone cared enough to look at it (added tabs, ttk support, themes, window relayout, and some other things), and I don't think continuing with it in the stdlib is bringing any benefits. I have commit access, and although I have been inactive for two or three weeks (maybe a bit more) now, I have submitted plenty of fixes for tkinter which are mostly reviewed by Martin, and only, Martin -- when he has time to review or when the fix hits some level of "important enough" to be looked at. I could just commit these fixes, but some people would hate me then because I didn't let anyone review, so I don't really think adding more new committers will bring the benefits you are expecting. A different problem also present in both tkinter and IDLE is the lack of tests.
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 _______________________________________________ Python-Dev mailing list Python-Dev@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-dev Unsubscribe: http://mail.python.org/mailman/options/python-dev/bmiller%40luther.edu
-- Brad Miller Assistant Professor, Computer Science Luther College
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