[Python-Dev] contributors survey?

[Guido van Rossum]

On Tue, Mar 1, 2011 at 7:34 PM, Senthil Kumaran <orsenthil at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Tue, Mar 01, 2011 at 11:45:47PM +0100, Antoine Pitrou wrote:
>> hg log -k "contributor name"
>>
>> Also, memory helps although it's quite perfectible :)
>>
>> At worse, we'll have a couple of false positives and we'll have to
>> apologize to them...
>
> There are about 948 folks in the Misc/ACKS and many would have been
> 1/2 time contributors. There should be a handful of them who might
> have contributed significantly. Just asking them would be good idea
> (if you really need to survey).

It's impossible to match the ACKS file with email addresses; that was
never the intention anyway, it was meant to thank people. (Some people
are on the list for reasons having nothing to do with code
contributions, too.)

> Personally, I am not sure how this survey is going to be helpful.

I think it would be at least mildly useful to find out why people who
contributed code in the past stopped contributing. Over the years I've
sometimes had the opportunity to find out -- the reasons more often
than not had to do with life or career changes that are out of our
control; some have stopped contributing code to CPython but are
contributing in other ways (e.g. they may have started a different
project).

But I wouldn't be surprised if some people had regrets about the way
the community works (I can recall at least one such case) and it would
be useful to learn from those occasions, if they'll let us. And the
numbers might tell us something, too.

Perhaps a better way than scanning ACKS would be to collect
contributor email addresses from the svn logs and note those that
haven't contributed in the past 12 months.

-- 
--Guido van Rossum (python.org/~guido)