[Python-Dev] Attention Bazaar mirror users (original) (raw)

Stephen J. Turnbull stephen at xemacs.org
Sat Feb 21 13:15:25 CET 2009

"Martin v. Löwis" writes:

sjt sez:

I didn't say "from source", I said "from a VCS checkout". If using a specific recent official release of a core tool is bureaucratically infeasible, it would IMO be very unusual if you're allowed to checkout and build arbitrary versions of Python, rather than using a version provided by your bureaucrats.

The number of people whose job is specifically developing Python, or developing code that depends on bleeding-edge Python, in such an environment is surely very small.

This completely contradicts with my experience. In a university environment, students regularly check out software from the source repository, modify it, and build it, just to learn something by doing so.

You're ignoring the second paragraph quoted above. I'm not denying that such environments are common. The question is "Do developers restricted to such environments really have an impact on Python development to outweigh the real cost of standardizing on an older implementation of Bazaar to developers who would be able to use a more capable version?" I find it hard to believe that it would be so; Bazaar performance on a lot of measures was pretty poor in v1.5. I also find it hard to believe that there are very many serious developers who only have access to a school lab or who are misusing corporate resources to develop Python.[1]

Nor does this problem exist with Mercurial or git; both of those have more than adequate performance for basic operations with whatever- version-is-in-Debian-lenny (git 1.5.6 and Mercurial 1.0.1). So I don't see much harm to come from letting Bazaar at least put forward its nice shiny new shoes. Unless the Barry feels that that would be a risk to Bazaar's acceptability in the end. He apparently doesn't think so, though; rather that the improved performance and capabilities of recent bzr will make it more attractive to the great majority of Python developers than an older (more "democratic") bzr would be.

Besides, if Barry makes this experiment now and enough people speak up that it will make it difficult for them to contribute to Python, the Bazaar proponents can revert to an older version of Bazaar before a final decision is made.

Footnotes: [1] If it's their job to do so, and Python requires 1.12 to check out and push to the official sources, won't their bosses push to get the 1.12 PPA approved? I would estimate at least 6 months lead time before the SVN repo is decommissioned, maybe longer if it's maintained as a mirror for a while. That should be enough time to get that specific revision (not arbitrary installations!) approved.

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