cpython (original) (raw)

So I take it a straight answer to my question is "no, I didn't ask". Then that remains a problem: you can't sell an idea as "a solution" if you can't find real users with problems it would actually solve. "I like it better this other way" just isn't enough.

There's no point in repeating "worthless", unless you're just trying to blow off steam. It's pejorative and grossly overstated.

About BPO 8408, I hadn't seen it before. The resolution doesn't surprise me, despite that it seemed unprincipled. What you may not know: Noam Yorav-Raphael contributed substantial features to IDLE, and eventually started his own Python shell project (DreamPie - between IDLE and IPython in power). Because he was well-known, and because his patch actually solved a real problem his users were actually having in DreamPie, Georg wasn't inclined to push back, so applied his patch.

But I have no idea what "a right way" to solve that would have been. I wrote doctest 20 years ago, and never gave a thought to sys.displayhook. IDLE was the fanciest alternative shell in the world at that time, and it was an explicit non-goal of doctest's to cater to the IDLE shell'a weird mix of ">>> " and leading tabs.

I hadn't seen your BPO 26092 before either, but don't know what you expected from it. Open source is driven by people scratching their own itches, and in that report you didn't identify a specific problem or a specific solution. Hoping other people will drop what they're doing to think about it doesn't usually work 😉. No problem in trying that, but the python-ideas (or maybe python-dev if the idea is close to polished) mailing list is far more suitable for such stuff than the issue tracker.