[Python-Dev] Encouraging developers

["Martin v. Löwis"]

Ilya Sandler schrieb:
> I'd also suggest that request for test cases/docs comes after
> (or together with) suggestion that a feature is desirable in the first
> place.

It depends. I was going through some old patches today, and came
across one that added a class to heapq. I couldn't tell (even
after reading the code) what precisely all implications are, so
I was unable to proceed review beyond "please provide documentation
saying what this is for". I would then be able to tell:
a) whether it really does what it promises to do, and
b) whether this is desirable to have

I remember many occasions where a patch was rejected and never
reconsidered (even after discussion on python-dev) because the
submitter failed to clearly specify what the intention of the
change was, as it turned out that the code didn't implement the
intention, and people reviewing rejected it because they thought
it was meant to do something else (namely, to do what it actually
did).

Regards,
Martin