[Python-Dev] No response to posts

[Nick Coghlan]

On Tue, Aug 3, 2010 at 6:56 PM, Stephen J. Turnbull <stephen at xemacs.org> wrote:
> As Steven d'Aprano pointed out (admittedly with a bit of hyperbole) a
> very high percentage of issues (about 97%) do get some response, and
> nearly 87% of all issues ever submitted to Python have already been
> closed (based on the end-of-July tracker summary).  Remember that many
> of those that are still open are open because nobody's willing to call
> them "walking dead" and close them as "unsalvagable."  Any serious
> effort at triage by the people who would do the work to resolve them
> will surely result in a very large fraction closed with "wontfix",
> what is known as "a self-fulfilling prophecy".  It's not clear that's
> a win; some users surely think so, others not.

There's at least one low priority bug that I submitted a couple of
years ago (doctest freaking out a bit if you use angle brackets in the
nominal filename) that is still open because the workaround of "well,
don't do that then" is so much easier than actually figuring out why
it is freaking out (my initial diagnosis pointed the finger at one of
the regular expressions in linecache, but I never actually nailed a
definitive culprit). Normal filenames don't usually contain angle
brackets, and in my case, it was a completely invented filename so I
could easily drop the angle brackets from the name.

It's a real bug though, so I'd prefer not to see it closed as "wontfix".

While that kind of bug is low on the effort/reward scale from an
absolute point of view, someone could still learn a lot on a personal
level from fixing it. Having it brought to my attention again recently
let me provide some better information on how to reproduce it by
hacking a bit on the current test suite, so someone looking to learn
more about the dev process could definitely work through distilling it
down into a dedicated test case and then figuring out how to make the
new test case pass.

Cheers,
Nick.

-- 
Nick Coghlan   |   ncoghlan at gmail.com   |   Brisbane, Australia