[Idle-dev] To fork, or not to fork?

[Guido van Rossum]

> That is my question. I thought the immediate goal was to eliminate the need
> for a fork by reconciling the changes that had been made to the two branches
> in a way that supports the needs of both the official Python as well as
> VPython. Then future development (revitalization) would occur against this
> single new version of IDLE. Did I miss something?
> 
> All this talk of two branches and merging in the future and applying bug
> fixes from one to the other has me confused.

The point of the fork is to enable a smaller, more focused group of
developers to work on IDLE without having to earn commit privileges to
the Python tree.  Divide and conquer, so to speak.  If all goes well,
eventually this will be merged back into the main Python CVS tree.  In
the mean time, I promise not to make any changes to IDLE in the Python
CVS tree (unless I'm absolutely forced by circumstances, like the
addition of the "yield" keyword).

--Guido van Rossum (home page: http://www.python.org/~guido/)