[Python-Dev] [Idle-dev] Removing IDLE from the standard library

[Kurt B. Kaiser]

On Mon, Jul 12 2010, Tal Einat wrote:

> I have been maintaining my own fork of IDLE for several years and
> manually keeping it in sync with IDLE (this was simple). The
> difference is that there was no single major new feature I was working
> on, such as the addition of a sub-process in IDLE-fork or Noam's
> addition of auto-completion. I was mostly making relatively minor
> fixes and changes which were not interrelated. I saw no reason to have
> them all merged back at once, so I posted patches as soon as I felt
> they were ready, and did the best I could to get them accepted. I
> eventually gave up on this process because every patch took far too
> long to be addressed and finally accepted or rejected, and I realized
> that most of the work I had done would never be merged back into the
> mainstream version of IDLE.

There were several contributing factors.  I decided to stop committing
new features in 2.7 and focus on bugs for several reasons.  First, IDLE3
needed work to get it running smoothly.  Second, committing, forward
porting and running the (manual) functional tests on a bunch of small
features was a bit of a pain.  Third, leaving the new features to IDLE3
was a draw to get people to use the new version.  Then, about two years
ago, I got buried with PSF/PyCon issues.

If you'll look back in the IDLE NEWS, you'll see I was giving your
patches quite a bit of attention.

So never say never.

-- 
KBK