[Python-Dev] My patches

[A.M. Kuchling]

On Thu, Oct 30, 2008 at 03:55:38PM +0000, Paul Moore wrote:
> 2. Some patches marked as "documentation" are doc fixes, others seem
> to be issues where it has been decided that the behaviour is correct
> as is, but needs to be documented. Fair enough, but it's much harder
> to assess the latter, and there's no way of just grabbing the former
> (for example, to spend a spare 30 minutes reviewing simple stuff).

Perhaps the documentation category could be split into 'Documentation'
and 'Documentation Needed'; the latter means the issue entails writing
new text as opposed to rewriting.  But I think on average
documentation issues get processed pretty quickly: Georg is responsive
to them, and patches are easy to apply because you don't need to worry
about breaking anything.

In general Python development is much less freewheeling and fun than
it used to be.  You could come up with new features and modules, add
lots of new capabilities to a module.  Today we're making much smaller
changes, discuss them at far great length, and have to worry about
breaking all the existing Python code out there, It's a sign of
Python's maturity, of course, and I'm not saying that the design
effort and the compatibility requirements should be dropped, but they
certainly act as a damper.

On some of my issues (esp. ones relating to curses and mailbox.py), I
feel paralyzed because problems are occurring on platforms I don't
have access to (e.g. FreeBSD).  The buildbots will report problems,
but then you have to debug them by committing changes, triggering a
build, and observing the results.  And all of these actions will send
e-mail to python-checkins.  (Imagine if every 'print "reached here!"'
you added while debugging was e-mailed to everyone...)

--amk