ACCEPTED: PEP 285

[Tim Peters]

[William Dodé]
> how many [active Python developers] their are ?

Guido controls two "full-time equivalents", which includes his own time on
Python, Barry's work on Mailman, and Fred's work on docs.  All other work is
volunteer (including, I'd wager, most PythonLabs work on Python).  You can
determine who was active at any given time, and what they were doing then,
by studying the checkin history:

    http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-checkins/

The number of people who actually check something in in any given month
amounts to a handful, and some are "one issue" developers (like Jack Jansen
for Macintosh support); others are "almost one issue" developers (like
Marc-Andre Lemburg for Unicode support).  Martin von Loewis and Michael
Hudson are currently Python's most prolific "all issue" frequent
contributors outside of PythonLabs.  Michael is currently over his eyeballs
getting 2.2.1 ready, and only God knows how Martin manages to do all that he
does.

Hundreds and hundreds of people have contributed to Python over the years,
and it all adds up.  When the community wants an *ongoing* commitment to a
new scheme, though, they should realize that the pool of ongoing Python
contributors-- consistently contributing Python work week after week --is
tiny.  Even PythonLabs has weeks when it can't do Python work at all.