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

Facundo Batista facundo at taniquetil.com.ar
Wed Mar 7 14:10:16 CET 2007

A.M. Kuchling wrote:

FWIW, I have a related perception that we aren't getting new core developers. These two problems are probably related: people don't get patches processed and don't become core developers, and we don't have enough core developers to process patches in a timely way. And so we're stuck.

Any ideas for fixing this problem?

I think that there's a barrier entry: there's no place to ask for help on silly problems when you're trying to help (!).

Let me explain my bad english wording, with an example. Yesterday night I started modifying socket.py and test_socket.py. "Of course", I said, "let's see if the tests pass ok before start changing anything".

Went to ~/devel/reps/python/trunk/Lib, and made:

$ python2.5 test/test_socket.py ... Wrong!

Damn! Tried a lot of stuff...

$ cd test $ python2.5 test_socket.py ... Wrong! $ python2.5 regrtest.py test_socket ... Wrong! $ python2.5 regrtest.py test_socket.py ... Wrong! $ python2.5 regrtest.py socket ... Wrong!

And thousand more combinations. The best I could do is actually execute the tests, but python was getting the installed socket module, and not the repository socket module (even that I was in the same directory of the latter).

I didn't know what to try. I was stuck. This never happened to me when working on Decimal. What went wrong in my head in the middle?

I finally understood the problem, and build python from the repository, and made the tests from this python (actually, this was an easy step because I'm on Ubuntu, but I would be dead if working in Windows, for example).

Ok. Me, that I'm not ashame of asking what I don't know, if I didn't resolve it I'd finally asked in python-dev. But how many people would have throw the towel withoug getting so far?

How many people want to submit a patch, or even a bug, or finds a patch to review, but don't know how to do something and thinks that python-dev is not the place to ask (too high minds and experienced people and everything)?

What I propose is a dedicated place (mailing list, for example), that is something like a place where you can go and ask the silliest questions about helping in the developing process.

Me, for example, has an actual question to this list: "How can I know, if I change something in the doc's .tex files, that I'm not broking the TeX document structure?".

Just my two argentinian cents.

Regards,

-- . Facundo . Blog: http://www.taniquetil.com.ar/plog/ PyAr: http://www.python.org/ar/

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