[Python-Dev] getting patches committed (was Docs of weak stdlib modules should encourage exploration of 3rd-party alternatives) (original) (raw)

R. David Murray rdmurray at bitdance.com
Wed Mar 14 06:29:15 CET 2012

On Wed, 14 Mar 2012 06:03:10 +0200, Eli Bendersky <eliben at gmail.com> wrote:

> Rather than indicating apathy on the party of third party developers, this > might be a sign that core Python is unapproachable or not worth the effort. > > For instance I have several one line patches languishing, I can't imagine > how disappointing it would be to have significantly larger patches ignored, > but it happens.

A one-line patch for a complex module or piece of code may require much more than looking at that single line to really review. I hope you understand that.

In addition, sometimes patches just get forgotten. It's not like there are enough core devs with enough time that we are actually doing searches for open issues with patches...generally we have enough to do in our interest areas, and so stay there unless an issue is brought to our attention.

So to bring an issue to our attention, you can first ping the issue with a status query, or get someone (anyone, pretty much) to do a review and post it to the issue. You can also look to see if you can figure out, either from the experts list in the devguide, or hg history, or tracker activity, who might be a reasonable person to look at the issue, and add them to the nosy list.

Either of these actions will often "wake up" an issue, and if it is not one of the complex (or controversial) ones Eli alluded to, it will often then get committed.

If that fails, and the patch has been on the tracker for a while, it is perfectly reasonable to ask about it here.

What we really need most are reviews. And we need these for two reasons.

First, there aren't enough active committers to keep up with the patch inflow. Reviews really help, because they usually simplify the commit review process for the committer, saving time, and making it more appealing to work on the issue.

Second, it is as much (or more) from quality reviews as quality patches that we recognize people who it would be beneficial to invite to be committers. And every new committer increases the chances that new patches will actually get committed....

--David

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