[Python-ideas] itertools.chunks(iterable, size, fill=None)

Stephen J. Turnbull stephen at xemacs.org
Fri Jul 6 07:26:57 CEST 2012


Annoying cross-post trimmed.

anatoly techtonik writes:

 > Before anything else I must apologize for significant lags in my
 > replies.

No, that's nothing you need to apologize for.  Taking time to
formulate a decent reply is common courtesy, and commendable.  We're
really *not* in a hurry here; Python is going to be around for a few
more decades at least.

What you need to apologize for is the major faux pas of cross-posting.
Please cut it out, and in particular trim your own address list when
replying, or use Reply-To (and maybe Mail-Followup-To) to redirect
others' replies to an appropriate list.  IMO, the right list for this
discussion is python-ideas, but at the very least choose one.

and again he writes:

 > Make the bloody FAQ and summarize this stuff? Why waste each others
 > time? If people don't enjoy repeating themselves over and over -
 > there is a bloody wiki. What should happen to people to start
 > extracting gems of knowledge from piles of dusty sheets called list
 > "archives" for others to admire.

This is a terrible idea for python-dev and python-ideas.  While it is
frustrating to get a "been there, done that, rejected with extreme
prejudice" reply, and there's no question that searching the archives
is a hit-and-mostly-miss kind of thing because of the difficulty of
choosing good search terms, it's really not that costly to come back
with "I'm sorry, I couldn't find the thread".  Rather than spend
effort on writing a FAQ that would rather quickly turn into a
monstrosity hardly more easy to search than the archives themselves,
and almost never be read, we should devote any effort to improving the
capability for searching archives (and the wiki and the issue
tracker).

The problem with trying to put everything into the FAQ is that it's a
terribly unrewarding thing to do.  Most of the stuff you will write
will be ignored and profit nobody.  It really needs to be selected, by
somebody with taste and knowledge of user needs.  Presumably O'Reilly
or somebody has a "Python Hacks" book -- go buy it, which will
encourage the author to keep up the good work.  If they don't, why
don't you propose it to them, and write it yourself?  Then you can
measure how good an idea it is by your royalties.

Or if you don't feel like writing it yourself, maybe you can convince
O'Reilly to come up with a big enough advance to interest somebody
like Terry Reedy or Steven d'Aprano or even Raymond Hettinger or David
Beazley.

Regards,



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