[Idle-dev] /me waves

[Guilherme Polo]

Hello,

2013/3/26 Terry Reedy <tjreedy at udel.edu>:
> On 3/22/2013 4:35 PM, Bruce Sherwood wrote:
>
>> On the Mac, clicking on the Preferences
>> menu option (for configuring IDLE) causes a crash,
>
>
> Fixed last October, http://bugs.python.org/issue15853
>
>
>> but I assume the situation is similar to that on Windows.
>
> I am not sure what you mean. The above issue was mac only.
>

Please note that Bruce is talking about much earlier patches,
adjustments, etc. The fact that the same issue was (possibly) posted
as a dupe last year is highlighting the fact that IDLE is lacking
attention, and this is known for a long time already.

>
>> Among many improvements, Polo implemented a feature that if there is an
>> execution error in a spawned program that creates a window, the shell
>> with the error message comes forward of that window so that you see the
>> error,
>> ...
>
>
> Did G.Polo ever attach a patch to an issue? I do not remember seeing one
> like this..
>

I sincerely no longer remember if such ticket was created in
bugs.python.org. There was another site, which is offline (for some
time) now, that contained and tracked all the relevant fixes,
improvements, etc. I believe most of them were simultaneously added in
bugs.python.org, but the new features were not. The reasoning for that
was very simple: not even relevant bug fixes were being commited, so
we decided that new features would attract even less interest since
they were likely to introduce more bugs.

Note that I could have committed the patches myself, I believe I still
can if no one revoked my committer access. But I had some very bad
experience with other committer(s) pointing out my name for problems
unrelated to what I was committing, and that was largely the reason I
lost interest in committing anything. By the way, Martin von Löwis is
an exceptional opposite example of that, and I feel bad for basically
abandoning IDLE after his support.

>
>> Another significant feature of Polo's work that still hasn't made it
>> into IDLE is the preference option to permit not having to save the
>> program at all, something that makes a surprisingly big difference for
>> experimentation.
>
>
> Programs have to be saved in something the user process can read. The issue
> is making this automatic if one wishes. There is already an option to
> autosave after saving a file once. I use a 'tem.py' file in my miscellaneous
> python scripts directory. Since I use it often, it is usually near the top
> of the 'Recent files' list, making it almost as easy to open as a new file.
> So I never see anything about saving unless I decide to SaveAs. With that
> trick, I effectively have the nosave edit, run, view output cycle already. I
> agree, it is very nice.
>
> gpolo is nosy on 59 closed issues, 31 open issues. I did not see any about
> running without explicit saving.

This is in the bag of the "new features", which most likely were not
included in bugs.python.org for the previous reasons.

>
>> Because I considered these improvements and various bug fixes carried
>> out by Polo to be so important, yet there seemed to be no way to get
>> IDLE updated, starting in 2009 ...
>
>
> I think 2009 is about when Kurt Kaiser tapered off his IDLE work. 30 patches
> were pushed from last October to January. IDLE work is currently frozen
> waiting for PEP434 to be accepted. If and when it is, I will start
> committing and pushing more patches.
>
> --
> Terry Jan Reedy
>


-- 
-- Guilherme H. Polo Goncalves