[Python-ideas] Iterative development

[Georg Brandl]

Am 30.01.2014 17:17, schrieb Zachary Ware:
> I haven't been following this thread very closely, but I have to
> disagree with you here, Anatoly.
> 
> On Thu, Jan 30, 2014 at 5:24 AM, anatoly techtonik <techtonik at gmail.com> wrote:
>> It is quite obvious from outside that Python has some kind of process,
> 
> Which is well documented in several places.  It can be tricky to
> always find all of those places, but anyone who is interested can ask,
> and will be quickly shown where to look.

Nowadays the development process is really well documented in the devguide.
If anything is still not in there, that should be fixed.

>> but it is quite hard to sync to it for people from outside,
> 
> I'm not sure what you mean here.  Every contributor starts from
> "outside" of Python.  I found no difficulty in getting started when I
> did, and I've seen several people start contributing successfully
> since then.  It would be very hard to go from nothing to suddenly
> contributing huge patches to the innermost details of Python at a
> rapid pace, but that's not really what people (especially people new
> to open source development, like I was) should be doing anyway.  Start
> slow and small, build from there, and it's an easy and painless
> process.
> 
>> because it is not open
> 
> Here I must disagree emphatically.  My entire Python experience shows
> me that everything about Python is as open as possible.  If you want
> to know something, look for it.  If you can't find it, ask for it.

That's the key: *ask* for it.  Do not rant that you didn't find something,
complain that it wasn't in some random place you expected it, and then not
accept help and hints from people that weren't put off replying you in the
first place.

>> - 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.

>> 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.

cheers,
Georg