[Python-Dev] topics I plan to discuss at the language summit

Nick Coghlan ncoghlan at gmail.com
Tue Jan 12 13:10:14 CET 2010


Antoine Pitrou wrote:
> Le Mon, 11 Jan 2010 19:57:46 -0600, Brian Curtin a écrit :
>> For example, there are currently over
>> 1500 open issues with no stage set, some of which seemingly haven't been
>> read by anyone at all.
> 
> I think most issues /have/ been read. It's just that for many of them, 
> nobody is interested enough in or feels competent enough for fixing them.

There are actually a whole host of reasons issues can stagnate:
- a feature request may seem reasonable (hence it doesn't get rejected
outright), but the right API may not be clear (hence it doesn't get
implemented in the near term)
- a patch may be reviewed and found to have significant defects (or
simply be overreaching the stated goal) but the original patch poster
loses interest after meeting resistance in their ambition to fix
something that is "obviously" broken
- a problem may simply be hard to fix in a backwards compatible way (or
even at all!)

Ultimately it boils down to Antoine's two categories (lack of interest
and lack of relevant expertise to make a final decision) but there are a
lot of different ways to get into those two buckets.

Because we aren't ruthless about pruning those kinds of issues out of
the tracker they're the ones that are going to accumulate over time.

I'd actually be interested to know what the issue stats are like when
RFEs are excluded and when the search is limited to the items flagged as
'easy'. If easy bug fix issues are taking a long time to get closed than
that would bother me a lot more than RFEs that sit on the tracker for years.

Cheers,
Nick.

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



More information about the Python-Dev mailing list