[Python-Dev] I would like an svn account (original) (raw)

Steve Holden steve at holdenweb.com
Sat Jan 3 13:57:45 CET 2009

Brett Cannon wrote:

On Sat, Jan 3, 2009 at 00:50, "Martin v. Löwis" <martin at v.loewis.de> wrote:

A little offtopic: it seems to me it is a flaw of svn, that it encourages the model of two classes of developers, those with a commit access (first class) and those without it (second class). Victor -- maybe you can try something like "git svn", so that you don't have to use the bugtracker and wait until someone reviews the patches? I don't think that this changes anything at all. You can commit to your DVCS all the time, however, doing so is futile if your patches don't get integrated.

So you will always have two classes of developers: those with write permissions to the trunk branch, and those without. Nor will this ever change. I do not ever see us taking on the attitude of a project like Pugs where they give commit privileges to anyone who has ever written a single, good patch. FWIW, you can already get the Python tree through bazaar and a few other DVCSs. And work is being done to eventually transition to a DVCS anyway, so this will not be an issue forever. If I understood correctly, your main point is that using bugtracker for committing patches is very painful (I agree). I understood differently: I thought Victor's complaint is that some of his patches stay uncommitted for a long time. Victor wants to commit small changes without review. This is what I understood to be Victor's desire as well. Victor is prolific enough in writing patches for Python that he has been bitten by the fact that issues are triaged based on individual committer priorities which can lead to patches sitting on the tracker for a while. I think it was courageous of Brett to tackle this issue head-on as he did, and of Victor to respond so positively to the various comments that have been made on this thread. It would be a pity to lose a developer who so obviously has Python's best interests at heart.

As someone with a strong interest in Python's development, but whose interests lie outside direct development at the code face I would like to see some way where committed non-committers like Victor could be mentored through the initial stages of development, to the point where they can be trusted to make commits that don't need reversion.

In the old days this would have happened by a process known in the British training world as "sitting with Nellie" - doing the work next to, and directly supervised by, someone who had been doing it a long time and who knew all the wrinkles of the job. Quite how to achieve a similar effect in today's distributed development environment is less obvious.

Could we talk about this at PyCon (as well as continuing this thread to some sort of conclusion)? While the sprints are great for those who are already involved some activity specifically targeted at new developers would be a welcome addition, and might even help recruit them.

regards Steve

Steve Holden +1 571 484 6266 +1 800 494 3119 Holden Web LLC http://www.holdenweb.com/

More information about the Python-Dev mailing list