[Python-Dev] Mercurial migration readiness

[Steve Holden]

Antoine Pitrou wrote:
> On Fri, 02 Jul 2010 12:55:56 -0400
> Steve Holden <steve at holdenweb.com> wrote:
>> Fred Drake wrote:
>>> On Fri, Jul 2, 2010 at 8:34 AM, Antoine Pitrou <solipsis at pitrou.net> wrote:
>>>> The two sets of repositories use different conversion tools and rules.
>>>> They have nothing in common (different changeset IDs, different
>>>> metadata, different branch/clone layout).
>>> I'd love to see a more detailed description of this, including why
>>> someone new to Mercurial would choose one over the other.
>>>
>>> This information really belongs in www.python.org/dev/ rather than
>>> only in the mailing list.
>>>
>> +1
>>
>> As does a recent essay by Eli Bendersky, IMO. I believe it could lower
>> the barriers for entry into the "non-committer" class of developer. This
>> should make it easier for people to adapt Python to their own purposes
>> whether or not they want to contribute to the open source code base, but
>> also encourage people to investigate the compiler's innards.
> 
> With the moratorium on language constructs and builtins (not only in
> letter until 3.3, but more generally in spirit), I don't think we should
> encourage it at all, for such contributions would surely be rejected.
> 
> Rather than fancy syntax propositions or wild semantic
> changes/enhancements (such as have often been proposed on
> python-ideas), what we need is humbler but more useful work on stdlib
> bugs and improvements, as well as documentation and tutorials.
> 
> (what's more, those two kinds of contributions are likely to attract
> two different kinds of people, which means that people whose syntax
> patches get refused won't necessarily start contributing stdlib or
> documentation patches...)
> 
The point was not to encourage experimentation with wild syntax variants
(and Bendersky underlines that he knows perfectly well that Python does
not need an "until" statement. THe point is to encourage more people to
understand that what goes on under the hood is comprehensible.

regards
 Steve
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