[pydotorg-www] [Pydotorg] Mercurial mirror

[A.M. Kuchling]

> ... I am trying to change this by attracting more people,
> discussing problems to create an environment to make contributions
> easier and more fun.

There's some history in the Python community that makes some of us
doubtful of technical fixes to increase contributions.

For a long time the documentation was written using LaTeX, and people
kept saying that LaTeX was a barrier to contributions.  Eventually
Georg picked up the task, wrote Sphinx, and did the work to convert to
that format.  Sphinx has certainly been a success -- it's more
maintainable, produces better HTML output, and has been adopted by
dozens of other projects (I think 2-3 projects picked up the LaTeX
toolchain) -- but I don't think it's led to a notable increase in the
number of casual contributors or drive-by patches to the
documentation.

Therefore, I'm pretty cynical about attracting more contributions by
reorganizing the toolchain; Subversion vs. Mercurial seem largely the
same in the level of dedication required (high).  It seems better to
pick up and implement the idea of PHP-style commenting on the docs, or
rewrite the home page to be more inviting, or any of a number of other
tasks.

--amk