[Python-Dev] Goodbye (original) (raw)

"Martin v. Löwis" martin at v.loewis.de
Thu Sep 23 12:30:07 CEST 2010

Am 23.09.2010 11:43, schrieb Tim Golden:

On 23/09/2010 10:38, "Martin v. Löwis" wrote:

Let me ask a question which I don't think has been asked in this thread: are there guidelines for tracker-trawlers? I'm never sure where to look for this kind of thing myself. If there's nothing, I'm happy to pen a dos-and-donts (which I might do anyway, simply as a blog entry...)

Can you please rephrase the question? What's a "tracker-trawler"? My invented terminology for someone -- like Mark -- who invests time in going through issues in the tracker with a view to assessing them, prioritising them, de-duplicating, etc. As opposed to someone who's looking through issues with a view to finding things to fix within a particular area of competence.

Ah. I think this goes to the core of the dispute: My recommendation is not to trawl at all.

Instead, if you really want to contribute to Python, pick some area that you think needs most attention, and go through the tracker, and acquire competence in that area.

The question is how much time you want to spend per issue. If it's only a few minutes per issue, I question whether this is a useful activity. If the issue has been long-standing, most likely, a few minutes will not be enough. There may, occasionally, be an issue that has been forgotten about, but overall, I'd expect that that the amount of wasted time becomes considerable - you can spend hours and hours looking through issues just to find out that they are all really tricky and would require a lot of expertise to resolve, which you then are not willing to acquire. Also, for me, as somebody on the nosy list, this activity doesn't help: I would have to spend much more time than I have at hands. So any "is this still valid?" message gets deleted immediately, especially if there are ten of them in my inbox.

Regards, Martin

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