[Python-ideas] Iterative development

[Haoyi Li]

If you wrote as many patches as you did long emails, you would probably get
all the inside-knowledge on the development process that you wanted *and*
be in a better position to suggest changes =P


On Fri, Feb 7, 2014 at 4:22 AM, anatoly techtonik <techtonik at gmail.com>wrote:

> On Thu, Jan 30, 2014 at 11:15 PM, Georg Brandl <g.brandl at gmx.net> wrote:
> >>> - is not completely clear how the planning is made,
> >>
> >> I'm not sure what you mean here, what planning?  Anything that could
> >> be construed as "planning" is done via the PEP process, which is well
> >> documented in PEP 1.
> >
> > We have tried quite a few times to make it clear to Anatoly that there is
> > no "planning" made apart from what you can read about in PEPs and mailing
> > lists.  Apparently he thinks there's a secret agenda, when in reality
> there
> > often is no (shared) agenda at all -- that's in the nature of an open
> source
> > project.  Of course individual developers may have private agendas.
>
> Let's pinpoint the conflicting point first - "nature of an open
> source" - s/a/the/
>
> As I already pointed out, many open source project have planning, and
> before expanding the idea, let's say that I never had any conspiracy theory
> behind planning of Python development - I perfectly realize how the chaotic
> the process is, but that's not clear from outside, and what I am trying to
> say
> that not having any visible planning strategy (chaos is a strategy) is bad
> for
> any organized effort and more importantly - for an effort to organize.
>
> There is a big potential for self-organizing teams in Python community, but
> that's just didn't happen, because these team can't hold together. They can
> be organized around bugs (as in bug tracker), issues (as a "problem"),
> components (stdlib modules), releases (as it works now), tools (independent
> of core development at all), ideas (as we see in this thread). But to hold
> on,
> people from different time zones, cultures, need to sync. Iteration has one
> awesome and distinctive property - any iteration stripped of all the
> feature-
> creeped stuff is just a sync point in time.
>
> So, sync point is "subject, place and time". I tried to start with place
> for
> pydotorg (see thread few years ago), subject (attempt to split things by
> module in tracker) - https://bitbucket.org/techtonik/python-stdlib - good
> indicator of poor development of my skills and now I came to conclusion
> that the only thing that matters is time.
>
> Sync points are important, because they allow a project to be inclusive for
> people who are not interested in Python development at all, but may want
> to join later, because they want to make a change.
>
> You don't force people to read papers, but let them see hot it works. It is
> also more entertaining for the brain to watch the real thing and hack on
> ideas how to make the whole entrypoint more exciting. I can't name any
> reason why anyone should be excited with Python core developer when
> faced with a dusty tome of paperwork of ancient contributing wisdom
> written in largely uncommon English language.
>
> >>> which tasks are available for current sprint, what you can help with
> and how to track
> >>> the progress.
> >>
> >> This is the very definition of a bug tracker, and Python's is quite
> >> good for all of this.  There could stand to be some upkeep done on
> >> some of the older issues: it would be good for an impartial person to
> >> pick through and see whether an issue is still a problem, update any
> >> patches to apply to current branches, manage the 'easy' tag, add the
> >> proper people to the nosy list, etc.  This kind of thing would be a
> >> great place for someone to contribute.  Honestly, just bringing all
> >> tracker issues up to date would be a worthwhile sprint task in my
> >> opinion.
> >
> > Few people have tried that because it's such a thankless task, but
> > there was definitely progress.
>
> Make it thankful. Make 'implementing a Twisted Highscore for b.p.o'
> a goal of the next iteration and let people contributions flow.
>
> If truck can not pass through gate, somebody get out and lift it. If
> chaotic effort is ineffective, then coordinated effort can help. There
> could
> be coordinator for the one or two iterations, but it can be possible for
> technology to help with it in the long run if it is worthy.
> --
> anatoly t.
> _______________________________________________
> Python-ideas mailing list
> Python-ideas at python.org
> https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-ideas
> Code of Conduct: http://python.org/psf/codeofconduct/
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-ideas/attachments/20140207/f268305c/attachment-0001.html>