[Python-Dev] PEP announcements, and summaries

[Samuele Pedroni]

Hi.

> One thing about the reaction to the 2.1 alphas is that many people
> seem *surprised* by some of the changes, even though PEPs have been
> written, discussed, and mentioned in python-dev summaries.  Maybe the
> PEPs and their status need to be given higher visibility; I'd suggest
> sending a brief note of status changes (new draft PEPs, acceptance,
> rejection) to comp.lang.python.announce.
> 
> Also, I'm wondering if it's worth continuing the python-dev summaries,
> because, while they get a bunch of hits on news sites such as Linux
> Today and may be good PR, I'm not sure that they actually help Python
> development.  They're supposed to let people offer timely comments on
> python-dev discussions while it's still early enough to do some good,
> but that doesn't seem to happen; I don't see python-dev postings that
> began with something like "The last summary mentioned you were talking
> about X. I use X a lot, and here's what I think: ...".  Is anything
> much lost if the summaries cease?
> 

Before joining python-dev, I always read the summaries very carefully
and I found them useful and informing, on the other hand my situation
of being a jython devel was a bit special.

Some opinions from a somehow external viewpoint:
- more emphasis on the PEPs and their status changes could help.
- people should be able to trust PEP contents, they should really
  describe what is going happen.
Two examples:
- what was described in weak-ref PEP was changed just before realesing
the alpha that contained weak-ref support, because it was discovered
that the proposal could not be implemented in jython.
- nested scope PEP:
  the PEP indicated as most likely impl. way flat closures,
  and that'a what is in a2.
  from _ import * was not indicated as a big issue.
  Now that seems such an issue, and maybe chained closures are needed
  or some other gymnic with a performance impact.
  Now decisions and changes have to be made under time constraints
  and it seems not clear what the outcome will be, and wheter it will
  have the required long-term quality.
 
regards, Samuele Pedroni.