[python-committers] Quick status update on updating our dev process

[Brett Cannon]

I just thought I would quickly update everyone on where things stand in
terms of fixing our development process to be easier for us to keep up with
patches.

First, I have given Donald Stufft and Nick Coghlan a deadline of October 31
-- Halloween in North America -- to get demo instances of their approaches
for tweaking our approaches (and they were the only ones to propose
anything so if you are asking "what about considering XXX?", it's because
no one proposed it and stepped up to make sure it happened if their
approach was chosen). Nick is proposing using Kalithea and his proposal is
found at https://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0474/ . Donald is proposing
GitHub + Phabricator -- although the Phabricator bit is optional for people
-- and his proposal is at https://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0481/ . The
plan is to get the test instances up, play with them to see what it looks
like from both a core dev and contributor perspective and get opinions from
various people of different levels of experience as to how the proposals
feel. My hope is to make a decision by January 1 so we can switch over
ancillary repositories like the devguide, devinabox, and the benchmark
suite quickly and then work towards switching the cpython repository.

Second, if you find Misc/NEWS a pain when doing merges then have a look at
http://bugs.python.org/issue18967 and look at the recent posts. Larry
Hastings is proposing a wrapper around `hg commit` that will create
individual files per NEWS entry so that you can just pull the file forward
in a merge and thus have no issues. We probably need feedback from Windows
developers more than anyone since this would make using TortoiseHg a bigger
pain since you would need to generate the NEWS file separately before doing
your commit while everyone else has it integrated into the commit process.
The long term goal is to put a field in the issue tracker for the NEWS
entry so that it's directly attached to the issue related to the change and
makes it easier to update before a release.

So that's the current status. As always, if you want to participate in any
of this you should join the core-workflow@ mailing list.
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