[Python-Dev] http://bugs.python.org/issue231540

[Brian Curtin]

On Fri, Jul 23, 2010 at 18:39, Mark Lawrence <breamoreboy at yahoo.co.uk>wrote:

> On 24/07/2010 00:09, Paul Moore wrote:
>
>> On 23 July 2010 23:26, Mark Lawrence<breamoreboy at yahoo.co.uk>  wrote:
>>
>>> Is there any money to pay for the forthcoming 10th birthday party for
>>> this
>>> issue?  Is the OP still alive?
>>>
>>
>> I'm not sure the sarcasm helps much. What do you suggest should be
>> done with the request? Nobody has provided a patch, so there's nothing
>> to commit. Closing it as "won't fix" seems unreasonable, as I imagine
>> that should a suitable patch be supplied, it would be accepted.
>>
>> There's no magical means by which such a patch would appear, though.
>> The OP clearly[1] is either not interested enough or doesn't have the
>> skills to provide a patch, and no-one else has stepped up to do so.
>>
>> Note that it's been classified as a feature request, not a bug. So
>> there's nothing wrong, as such, with it remaining unresolved.
>>
>> Paul.
>>
>> [1] I say "clearly" - it may be that he could provide a patch if
>> asked. Maybe it would be worth you contacting him to ask if the issue
>> is still a problem for him, and whether he can assist in resolving it.
>>
>
> Paul,
>
> I'm on the verge of giving up my time because the whole system is a
> complete and utter waste of my time.  I feel quite happy that in my brief
> tenure I've closed 46 issues, but there's so many more that could have been
> closed, but yet again you don't even get the courtesy of a response when
> there's more in the pipeline that could be closed.  I'd quote the issue
> numbers here and now, but I'm just too flaming tired to do so, though a
> quick count indicates I've got 23 ongoing that I'm attempting to sort.
>
> As it happens, I have been having discussions offline in an attempt to
> shift the culture of Python development but I don't believe that anything
> will come out of it.  Let's face it, development is much more interesting
> than bug fixes. And once again, if some stupid idiot volunteer bothers to
> put in a patch to the code and/or the unit test, and it sits and rots for
> five years, is that person likely to come back to Python?  Strangely, some
> do.
>
> Sorry, I'm off to bed.
>
> Yours feeling most disillusioned with python-dev.


Mark,

First off, thanks for your time. One thing I don't feel is very beneficial
is to focus so much on the number of issues you are able to close, because
that number by itself is too high-level. Closing 10 issues might not be
better than closing 5 issues. If you follow baseball, it's like a pitcher's
win total. A higher number doesn't really mean the pitcher is better, and a
lower number doesn't mean the pitcher is worse. You find the better pitcher
by drilling down into more specific statistics.

Closing an obviously invalid issue takes little effort, but it's a -1 for
the issue total. Closing an issue as fixed might take a little more effort
in tracking down a revision number, but it's a -1 for the total and some
varying value for performance, coverage, etc. Closing an issue early because
no one commented or no one proposed a patch in some certain time span is, to
me, +1 to the total, possibly more. Not closing an issue is a +/- 0.

An issue is an issue once confirmed, regardless of a lack of comment or a
lack of attention from core development. I agree that it's unfortunate
having issues drag on, but time is one of the biggest bottlenecks in the
development of open source software. We have plenty of qualified, quality,
smart people working on Python, but there are only so many hours in the day
that we can spend on it.

With that said, I hope you'll continue your efforts. What helped me when I
started out in your position was to pick issues I knew I could work on with
relative ease and come out without having to duck too many times. I knew I
wasn't going to remove the GIL, but I could start with some of the low
hanging fruit like making zipfile.ZipFile work as a context manager (first
thing I fixed, I think). Like you, I wanted to make an impact, and in order
to make a longer term impact I wanted to have some early success to get
further into the game. No one wants to keep going if it's not fun, and this
should be fun.

My suggestion is to throw more effort into less issues. Going back to
baseball, if you can advance the runners without getting on base yourself
(e.g., a sacrifice fly out), that's still a good thing for the team.
Providing a code review to a review-less issue is more valuable than
requesting that someone else provide comments -- a review moves the issue
along. Updating a patch to a current revision is worth more than seeing if
anyone still runs AIX -- updating moves the issue along.
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