[stdlib-sig] Breaking out the stdlib

[Antoine Pitrou]

Le mardi 15 septembre 2009 à 18:22 -0400, Jesse Noller a écrit :
> 
> And I can find at least 176 reasons why owners are a good idea:
> 
> http://bugs.python.org/issue?%40search_text=&title=&%40columns=title&id=&%40columns=id&stage=4&creation=&creator=&activity=&%40columns=activity&%40sort=activity&actor=&nosy=&type=&components=&versions=&dependencies=&assignee=&keywords=&priority=&%40group=priority&status=1&%40columns=status&resolution=&nosy_count=&message_count=&%40pagesize=50&%40startwith=0&%40queryname=&%40old-queryname=&%40action=search

Sorry, what's that URL supposed to prove? What does it even represent?
It is a populist argument at best, because I won't skim through those
176 bugs to try and make sense of your argument. If you want to make a
point, please don't try to leave the burden of proof on me.

Actually, I'll just take one of them, because I know it quite well:
http://bugs.python.org/issue4967

This is a bug in _ssl for which I had to write a patch, although I knew
nothing about _ssl, because the owner wouldn't react. He wouldn't react
for review either. The bug *had* to be fixed because it blocked the
whole process of including the C IO library.
Finally, Benjamin committed the patch. The owner didn't give a sign of
life *during the whole process*. He isn't dead, he still sometimes
contributes to python-dev, but he was totally unavailable when his
presence was needed.

So much for owners being a good thing.

> The fact is, we need people who feel responsibility for every one of
> these modules to review patches, and have some amount of mental design
> integrity to ensure modules don't just wander off into the sunset and
> die.

But this is not the same as having an owner.

Perhaps it wasn't clear, but I draw a clear separation between exclusive
owners and maintainers.

I'm all for non-exclusive maintainership, with people having reasonable
authority over code they understand thoroughly. You taking care of
multiprocessing falls into this category (as long as you don't demand to
approve of all changes before they are committed).

I'm against ownership, however. I'm against mandatory signoffs
(imprimaturs), and I'm against the possessive sentiment that some might
develop towards a piece of code they contributed. Any core developer
should be allowed to commit a patch if he thinks the patch is reasonable
enough and serves an useful purpose.

Ownership prevents proper maintenance when the owner is absent (which
*will* happen, since we are all unpaid volunteers). It discourages other
people from getting acquainted with the code, which gradually makes the
problem worse. Furthermore, it is often correlated with strange
(personal) idioms, coding styles and design principles.

Regards

Antoine.