[Python-Dev] IDLE in the stdlib

[Nick Coghlan]

On Wed, Mar 20, 2013 at 12:54 PM, Barry Warsaw <barry at python.org> wrote:
> On Mar 20, 2013, at 12:40 PM, Guido van Rossum wrote:
>
>>I didn't hear any at the sprint here.
>
> JFDI! :)

Please don't rush this. We have Roger Serwy being given commit
privileges specifically to work on Idle, Terry's PEP proposing to make
it explicit that we consider IDLE an application bundled with Python
that can receive new features in maintenance releases and several
people expressing interest in helping to make IDLE better (primarily
educators, including Katie Cunningham, one of the teachers who ran the
Raspberry Pi based Young Coders sessions for teens and pre-teens here
at PyCon).

These are the people who care about Idle, we should be recruiting them
to work on it *as it is now*, and then letting them decide if they
wish to continue working on it as it is now, or if they prefer to move
to a more inclusive development platform which allows them to accept
pull requests rather than requiring patches to be generated locally
and uploaded to our tracker.

It's not as simple as saying "let's split it out to a separate repo
and then bundle it", because bundling still means python-dev is
placing it's stamp of approval on the application, which means we
should be satisfied that the developers leading the project are people
we trust as stewards of software we distribute.

Yes, the status quo of Idle is not something we should allow to
continue indefinitely, but decisions about its future development
should be made by active maintainers that are already trusted to make
changes to it (such as Terry and Roger), rather than those of us that
don't use it, and aren't interested in maintaining it.

Regards,
Nick.

-- 
Nick Coghlan   |   ncoghlan at gmail.com   |   Brisbane, Australia