[Python-Dev] draft 3.1 release schedule

[Brad Miller]

On Mon, Mar 2, 2009 at 4:22 PM, "Martin v. Löwis" <martin at v.loewis.de>wrote:

> > Would whoever is responsible for IDLE please take a look at the patches
> > I submitted for Python 2 & 3 [tracker IDs 5233 and 5234 respectively].
> > These change the behavior of IDLE so that IDLESTARTUP or PYTHONSTARTUP
> > files are executed with each restart. This allows loading frequently
> > used packages, personal utilities, etc. automatically at each restart. I
> > consider this a very important problem in IDLE, especially when using it
> > to teach.
>
> Just to put this into perspective: I personally don't see that as a very
> important problem. I didn't know IDLESTARTUP existed, and I use
> PYTHONSTARTUP only for the command line (to setup readline and history).
> I think there are many more open issues that are *way* more important.


Martin,

  No disrespect intended but I don't see how this puts things into
perspective.  I'm writing to you from the annual computer science education
conference (SIGCSE)  where Python is clearly gaining ground as an important
language for teaching computer science.

It seems logical to me that the committers are high powered Python users who
don't think much about Python being used in education.  I'm just as
frustrated as Mitchell about a patch for displaying ranges and
dict_keys/values objects in a more user friendly way.  I submitted this
patch during the 3.0 alpha phase and it is still sitting around.  For me
this is a serious problem, but I can understand how it seems pretty minor to
others, who are not teaching new programmers.

So what is the solution?  The obvious solution is for one of us, that is
someone who uses Python as an education tool, to become a committer.  This
seems problematic to me.  Although I'm willing to be a committer, and I'm
confident I have the development skills necessary to be a committer I don't
have the time to develop the resume of patches needed to earn that
privilege.

It would be nice if we could find some solution to this.

Brad


>
> This is not to say that the patch should not applied - I haven't even
> looked at it. It's just a warning that, if no other committer feels this
> is as important as you fell it is, it may not be committed reviewed and
> committed before 3.1.
>
> Regards,
> Martin
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-- 
Brad Miller
Assistant Professor, Computer Science
Luther College
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