[Python-Dev] Python in education

["Martin v. Löwis"]

Randy Chung wrote:
> I'm going to be leading a class on Python at the University of 
> California, Berkeley next semester (starting in January).  I'm 
> interested in using actual bugs in Python as exercises for the class, 
> the goal being 1) to give the students something "real" to work with, 
> and 2) to (hopefully) contribute back anything we manage to put together 
> to the Python dev team.

Welcome to the club! I'm just running a class on development processes
in open source software (i.e. with a somewhat different scope), where
students already have fixed bugs in Mozilla and PHP - unfortunately,
none of them were interested in Python. Nevertheless, this is quite
fun for both the students, and myself - especially when the Mozilla
guys do a review after 3h, the super review after 36h, and explain that
they cannot commit the fix because the code is frozen (and then do
after two weeks, well before the presentation in the class).

> What I'm looking for are some oustanding bugs which the more experienced 
> devs feel would be straightforward to implement

I'd look in the one-to-two-year old range of bugs. One risk in such
a course is that some of the developers fixes the bug while your student
is working on it, which is discouraging. How many bugs do you need?

The *really* easy ones are documentation bugs, but I expect that
students don't see this as a sufficient challenge. There are currently
roughly 100 documentation bugs open.

You can further filter out all assigned bugs; the unassigned ones
are likely resting because nobody cares (yet).

Looking at unassigned bugs starting from offset 300, I think all
of the following bugs might be suitable:
- 840065
- 839151
- 837242 (really trivial)
- 828743
- 813986

> If you feel this is off topic, please feel free to reply to me off-list.

This is clearly python-dev relevant.

Regards,
Martin