[Python-Dev] Developer resources (was Re: Stability and change)

Tim Peters tim.one@comcast.net
Tue, 09 Apr 2002 02:15:45 -0400


[Fred L. Drake, Jr.]
> Not sure that's really the right approach.  I'd rather see more effort
> go to persistent resources (like www.python.org/dev/; thanks
> Andrew!).  Questions can reasonably be sent to python-dev and can feed
> the expansion & update of that material.

If anyone can make time to write guides, here are some specific points from
a newer developer after tackling a small Python internals project, extracted
from one of the emails I'm unlikely ever to answer (there isn't "a crisis"
here, so it goes to the bottom of the stack):

"""
I was surprised at how many skills I needed to acquire to get this done:

+ editting .tex help files
+ communicating via SourceForge
+ learning to use CVS
+ finding where to put the unittests
+ learning what a context diff was
+ the ins and outs of METH_O
+ the subtleties of decref
+ the performance costs to tuple formation and arg parsing
"""

The good/bad news is that those things come up soooooo often that within a
few weeks they'll forget they were ever a mystery.  The barriers to entry
are many; then again, the kind of code developer Python needs is someone
obsessed enough to view that as a contemptible challenge <wink>.