[stdlib-sig] GHOP / py3k (was: Evolving the Standard Library)

[C. Titus Brown]

On Wed, Sep 16, 2009 at 01:08:28PM -0700, Brett Cannon wrote:
> On Wed, Sep 16, 2009 at 07:49, C. Titus Brown <ctb at msu.edu> wrote:
> >>Michael said:
> >> Armin said:
> >> > That, and a group of
> >> >people, dedicated to standard library refactoring. ??The majority of
> >> >libraries in the standard library are small and easy to understand, I'm
> >> >sure they are perfectly suited for students on projects like GSOC or
> >> >GHOP to work on. ??They could even be used as some sort of "playground"
> >> >for new Python developers.
> >>
> >> It would be a great project for GHOP *if* we have some experienced
> >> developers, like yourself, dedicated to working out what the things that
> >> need fixing are.
> >
> > Testing and doc updates worked reasonably well within GHOP last time,
> > and surprisingly little in the way of "experienced developers" were
> > needed. ??Faced with the responsibility of coming up with dozens of tasks
> > on short notice, I picked a dozen stdlib modules and said
> >
> > ??test this
> > ??integrate doug hellmann's documentation
> > ??run through the existing examples and write more
> >
> > ...and voila, it happened and attracted positive notice from the BDFL,
> > which is saying something.
> >
> 
> We can also run figleaf or coverage.py across the standard library and
> see which modules have horrible test coverage.

Yes, and I expect to integrate the GSoC work on C code coverage, too,
along with multi-platform build results.  (Titus's Motto: "coercing
other people into building my own testing infrastructure from scratch
since 2006".)

> > By far the most important part of that process was not my role in
> > putting the tasks up, but Georg's role in reviewing the patches and
> > committing them in a timely manner. ??I can't speak for how much time he
> > spent doing that, however, and I certainly don't expect that level of
> > effort from HIM this time; perhaps with Mercurial we can get
> > non-committers to act as first-pass filters to reduce the strain on
> > Georg or whoever steps into his shoes. [0]
> 
> Hey, I helped a lot last time (and plan to do so again). As for the
> Mercurial thing, it might not happen by December, so don't rely on
> that (although we always have the mirrors so we can instruct the
> students on how to use those).

Yes, I remember -- no denigration intended, just that Georg devoted an
absolutely insane amount of time to it ;)

> > Perhaps this time we can focus on py3k stuff with GHOP; that'd be great,
> > and a real community boost, IMO.
> 
> One possibility is to simply only care about the test and doc changes for py3k.

OK, sounds good.

--t
-- 
C. Titus Brown, ctb at msu.edu