[Python-Dev] Official Roadmap (Re: Let's get PEP 380 into Python 3.3)

[Guido van Rossum]

A project roadmap is usually something that a team commits to, with
some caveats, in order to give the customers (the "outside world")
some view in development that is already planned or under way or on
some other way committed to.

But a roadmap itself takes effort to create and maintain. Also, often
projects are undertaken on the spur of the moment that aren't on the
roadmap, and changes in personnel or priorities may cause items to
linger on the "official" roadmap without making much progress.

I think that if someone is interested in contributing to Python but
they aren't into coding, managing a roadmap could be a useful role to
perform, especially for someone with some project management skills
and the tenacity to stick around for a long time. (You don't publish a
roadmap and then leave; it needs regular updates, say every month or
quarter at least.)

At the same time the roadmap manager ought to recall that they are not
the project manager and they will have to be careful not to use the
roadmap to force core developers (who all have their own agendas) to
do (or refrain from) specific things.

The kind of items that would make sense to have on a roadmap are
probably usually PEP-sized features; a list of feature extracted from
the tracker would be too overwhelming for the external consumers of
the roadmap.

A note about the example from dungeonhack: that format is probably too
detailed for Python; I don't think we need to have dates and assigned
developers in the roadmap. An example entry could say "yield from (PEP
380)".

There is no expectation for roadmaps to be complete or always uptodate.

Anyone feel compelled to give it a try?

--Guido

On Thu, Mar 3, 2011 at 6:12 AM, Brian Curtin <brian.curtin at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Thu, Mar 3, 2011 at 06:40, anatoly techtonik <techtonik at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>> On Sat, Feb 26, 2011 at 12:43 AM, Guido van Rossum <guido at python.org>
>> wrote:
>> > Now that the language moratorium is lifted, let's make sure to get PEP
>> > 380 implemented for Python 3.3.
>>
>> How about official RoadMap? There is no visibility into what's going
>> on in Python development. New people can' t jump in and help do bring
>> some features faster. http://dungeonhack.sourceforge.net/Roadmap
>
> You could put together something fancy out of a query for all 3.3 feature
> requests [0] if you want this.
> I'm also not sure if that would be entirely useful. Python development is
> fairly relaxed in that you work on what you want to work on, when you want
> to do it. If you fill up some roadmap with all 180 feature requests on that
> page, they are not all going to get done, and it's not a condition of doing
> the release.
>
> [0] http://goo.gl/4RMp8
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-- 
--Guido van Rossum (python.org/~guido)