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

glyph at divmod.com glyph at divmod.com
Tue Nov 4 11:54:31 CET 2008

On 02:47 am, guido at python.org wrote:

I disagree. They should be removed when the issue they refer to is removed. No sooner, no later. Simply removing every XXX comment older than a year would not be helpful. The code base is so large that over 2000 XXX doesn't faze me particular. There are over 4000 files in the Python 2.6 source code tarball!

The right thing to do with XXX comments is to read them when you're in their vicinity, and to act when the urge becomes too strong to deal with any one in particular. Dealing with them en masse is just asking for a migraine.

I strongly agree with what Guido is saying here. I already mentioned this indirectly in my other post to this thread but I feel like it's worth emphasizing, especially given that I think that the Twisted core team (myself included) is widely perceived, for good or ill, as being process-crazed maniacs.

We have a sort of meta-policy of "never try to boil the ocean". We started Twisted with a freewheeling, anything-goes commit policy, where if you had an account on the CVS server (my home desktop computer) you could do whatever you wanted: no code review, no compatibility, no testing. There's still a lot of code left over from those days, and a lot of it works fine.

Every policy we have applies to changes to the code; nobody has ever proposed a policy modification where we first fix all 1000 instances of X and then institute a policy on future X. Quite the opposite: the whole point of most of our development process is to avoid needing to do broad, sweeping changes.

So, while I don't really care much one way or the other about Python's treatment of future XXX, I definitely think it would be a terrible idea to try to deal with all XXXes at once, or even start an ongoing process of gradually farming through the old XXXes; that would almost certainly be a waste of everyone's time.

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