[Python-Dev] Python in education (original) (raw)

"Martin v. Löwis" martin at v.loewis.de
Sun Dec 19 19:13:55 CET 2004

Randy Chung wrote:

I'm going to be leading a class on Python at the University of California, Berkeley next semester (starting in January). I'm interested in using actual bugs in Python as exercises for the class, the goal being 1) to give the students something "real" to work with, and 2) to (hopefully) contribute back anything we manage to put together to the Python dev team.

Welcome to the club! I'm just running a class on development processes in open source software (i.e. with a somewhat different scope), where students already have fixed bugs in Mozilla and PHP - unfortunately, none of them were interested in Python. Nevertheless, this is quite fun for both the students, and myself - especially when the Mozilla guys do a review after 3h, the super review after 36h, and explain that they cannot commit the fix because the code is frozen (and then do after two weeks, well before the presentation in the class).

What I'm looking for are some oustanding bugs which the more experienced devs feel would be straightforward to implement

I'd look in the one-to-two-year old range of bugs. One risk in such a course is that some of the developers fixes the bug while your student is working on it, which is discouraging. How many bugs do you need?

The really easy ones are documentation bugs, but I expect that students don't see this as a sufficient challenge. There are currently roughly 100 documentation bugs open.

You can further filter out all assigned bugs; the unassigned ones are likely resting because nobody cares (yet).

Looking at unassigned bugs starting from offset 300, I think all of the following bugs might be suitable:

If you feel this is off topic, please feel free to reply to me off-list.

This is clearly python-dev relevant.

Regards, Martin

More information about the Python-Dev mailing list