[Python-Dev] Encouraging developers (original) (raw)

"Martin v. Löwis" martin at v.loewis.de
Tue Mar 6 10:24:15 CET 2007

Stephen J. Turnbull schrieb:

An informal version of this process is how XEmacs identifies its Reviewers (the title we give to those privileged to authorize commits to all parts of XEmacs). People who care enough to make technical comments on others' patches are rare, and we grab the competent ones pretty quickly.

My experience exactly. Besides Georg Brandl, I think this was also how Raymond Hettinger started his regular contributions to Python.

The mess is not "total", as Josiah Carlson points out. To the extent that it is a mess, it is the consequence of a process similar to the one you propose to institutionalize.

It wasn't clear to me that this is the case, but I think you are exactly right. Those libraries that are now considered a mess had been ad-hoc contributions in many cases, with a single use case (namely the one of the original contributor). The contributor is not to blame, of course: he could only contribute what he has experience with. I wouldn't blame the committers who accepted the libraries, either - much of Python's value is in "libraries included". So to fix "the total mess", one has to replace the libraries with better ones, were available, learning from past experience to not accept libraries that had not been widely tested "in the field".

Second, where the stdlib module is closely bound to the core, the maintainer ends up being the group of core developers. It can't be any other way, it seems to me.

It might be that individuals get designated maintainers: Guido maintains list and tuple, Tim maintaines dict, Raymond maintains set, I maintain configure.in. However, I doubt that would work in practice.

Regards, Martin

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