[Python-Dev] Moving bugs and patches through the pipeline more quickly (original) (raw)

Michael Hudson mwh@python.net
08 Mar 2002 10:04:34 +0000

Tim Peters <tim.one@comcast.net> writes:

[Jeremy Hylton] > When we were working on Python 2.0, PythonLabs made a > serious commitment to keep the list of bugs on one page. > Lots of people fixed bugs to achieve that goal, and more > processing power will definitely help.

Note that we had full-time jobs working on Python then too. Well, not entirely: at the end of the BeOpen run, all of PythonLabs was unemployed, so we got to spend 1200% of every day volunteering to finish 2.0.

I think there are more bugs being submitted now, too. We should never have told anyone about that tracker .

> One other thing that helped was that I spent many hours each > week tracking bugs and making sure someone was working on > them. I intend to pick that task up again for Python 2.3. > It would be great if there were more developers to lean on > for the bugs.

During the times I did that task, I spent about 30 hours per week on bug + patch triage alone. It would be hard to overestimate how much concerted effort it would take to get back to "one page" again; the SF stats (I think only admins can view the reports)

Nope. At least, I can see them.

show that we're falling further behind month by month. The "Feature Requests" tracker may as well be a trash can.

It's probably better that PEP 42. That should probably be sliced up and moved back into the tracker.

OTOH, we could make a lot of progress very quickly by agreeing to drop Python support for all save the OS + compiler Guido happens to use .

Certainly. Life would be easier if we didn't have to worry about bugs like:

[ 459464 ] Math_test overflowerror on sparc64 linux

(to pick a random example). I don't think keeping open bugs <50 is a realistic goal unless there's at least one person working full time on keeping things that way, and that doesn't seem likely. OTOH, a certain amount of progress is being made as the result of the current guilt trip -- let's see how long that lasts .

Cheers, M.

-- This is an off-the-top-of-the-head-and-not-quite-sober suggestion, so is probably technically laughable. I'll see how embarassed I feel tomorrow morning. -- Patrick Gosling, ucam.comp.misc