[Python-Dev] XXX do we need a new policy? (original) (raw)

Thomas Wouters thomas at python.org
Tue Nov 4 10:39:27 CET 2008

On Tue, Nov 4, 2008 at 07:04, "Martin v. Löwis" <martin at v.loewis.de> wrote:

> I see that Guido is not keen on the idea, and I'm not sure my > observations help sway things one way or the other. OTOH, it would be > nice if at least we always add our own identifier (initials, nick, email > address) and a date to the XXX so we at least know who was talking about > what.

I find it fairly easy to use "svn annotate" to learn about the source of an XXX comment. In many cases, the XXX comment is fairly obvious, anyway, so knowing who added it, and when, doesn't provide much useful information.

Ah, but that's not true in Subversion: you just see who committed the XXX comment, not who wrote it :-) I've been using the XXX(twouters) approach for a while and it's pretty convenient because who wrote the comment changes how you interpret the comment. See for instance r42313 and r42717 of Python/ceval.c: if I'd known the original comment was added by Jeremy, I would have interpreted the question correctly the first time around. (As it was, Jeremy came up to me at PyCon, I think :)

-- Thomas Wouters <thomas at python.org>

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