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

Terry Reedy tjreedy at udel.edu
Fri Sep 24 21:36:16 CEST 2010

On 9/24/2010 1:41 AM, Stephen J. Turnbull wrote:

Yes, and we'd all like more people to do more "real" work. But not everybody has the time or skills. I think this is a case where "agreeing to disagree" is the best we can do.

There is also the matter of letting people start with something they feel condident with and grow into more complicated tasks.

Specifically, Terry has made a strong case that "a few minutes per issue" can improve the tracker in ways that are noticable to some of the developers (and some of them have acknowledged that). It would be nice if the "tracker trimmers"[1] could assemble 60 of those into a few hours, and do some "real work", but that's often just not possible (especially for people with minimal programming expertise as yet).

Footnotes: [1] Trawlers take fish out of the ocean: not really the best metaphor. Gardening is a better metaphor.

For instance, while 'gardening', I discovered 4! duplicate open issues about the bug created by the difflib.SequenceMatcher heuristic. I consolidated them into one, got intrigued, did some tests with 3.1, read difflib.py, ..., and now have a patch posted written with Eli Bendersky.

-- Terry Jan Reedy

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