On Tue, Mar 1, 2011 at 4:23 PM, geremy condra <debatem1@gmail.com> wrote:
Well, you've noticed yourself how many times the same ideas and questions show up on python-ideas, and how often people think they're the first ones to come up with it. You've also noted that there are more productive problems that people interested in contributing could solve. ISTM that there may be an opportunity to kill two birds with one stone in that.
Specifically, I'd suggest starting by putting together a wishlist and a do-not-want-list from some of the core devs and putting it in a prominent place on python.org. That should be fairly easy, and if it doesn't seem to be getting the amount of traffic that it would need to succeed there are a number of good ways to tie it in to other venues- adding tickets to the bug tracker, putting it in a newsletter, having this list spit back an email mentioning it whenever someone starts a new thread, mentioning it on slashdot, etc. It might also be a good way to take advantage of the sprints board, by specifically asking groups that have done successful sprints in the past to look at these ideas and see if they can come up with good ways to solve them. None of that requires a huge outlay of cash or resources.
If this was successful, it might be a good idea to look at providing some in-Python support for those working on the wishlist items. With the hg transition already underway it seems like this should be fairly easy- just create an hg repo for the project in question and link it to a page on PyPI. Depending on the size of the project, amount of interest, timescale, and stage of maturity development discussion could take place either on the wiki, here, stdlib-sig, in their own google group, etc. Again, nothing requiring substantial outlay or time. The only investment required would be the effort of marketing the list as a whole.
From there, it would just be a question of what direction to take. I can envision a lot of projects like this or Raymond Hettinger's idea for a stats module eventually seeing inclusion, but there are also a lot of possible tools where maintaining a relationship similar to the Apache Foundation and its projects might be for the best.
I suspect it goes without saying, but I'd be happy to help out with this, and especially with PyCon coming up its a good time to put many eyes on problems like these.
Okay, I get it now. I don't know how many core developers are actually following python-ideas. If you are serious about putting time into this yourself, maybe the best thing you could do would be to start a draft for such a document, put it in the Wiki (with some kind of "draft" or "tentative" disclaimer) and post it to python-dev (as well as here) to get the core devs' attention. -- --Guido van Rossum (python.org/~guido)