[Idle-dev] integration process for new UI changes

[Mark Roseman]

Not to put words in Terry’s mouth, but I believe he’s almost ready to start looking at integrating some of the broader UI changes I’ve been developing into IDLE. I thought it would therefore be a good time to raise issues surrounding what that process might look like.

While most IDLE changes recently have been in the form of standalone, fairly independent patches, some of this work “feels” different, more like new, partially experimental, development. In particular:
	* many interdependent pieces, fairly hard to integrate individually
	* parts likely needing usage feedback before being included/finalized (or revised, or excluded)
	* usage and iteration will bring out other issues not yet known
	* limited automated testing, which even if more extensive would be misleading as to “correctness”

As well, it would seem that a “(re-)launch” in one form or another would be appropriate to get the word out and generate more interest from potential new helpers. :-)

All of this feels more like an alpha-beta-release process (i.e. the whole thing shows up at once) rather than incremental improvements over time and possibly spanning several Python releases.

From a development point of view, I’d normally approach this as a separate branch in the code repository, which would get integrated into the mainline on release. (I’ve kinda been doing that as I work through things myself, via github). What would be the best way to approach this for IDLE?

One possibility might be integrate things on the main (i.e. 3.6) branch, which I’m presuming won’t have an actual release of any kind for quite some time. 

That lets things get added more incrementally and tested by ourselves and others without it being inadvertently dropped on unsuspecting folk. It would be ok if at various times things were in an incomplete state. 

After a significant amount of integration, refinement and revision we might get to the point where as a group we’re “satisfied” with the new state of IDLE as a whole, and those changes get ported all at once to 3.5.x and 2.7.x where they’d actually hitting real people.

I’ll throw that out there anyway.  I’m sure others have many different ideas on this. Anyone care to share their thoughts?

Mark