[Python-Dev] Accepting PEP 434, Idle Enhancement Exception (original) (raw)

Nick Coghlan ncoghlan at gmail.com
Sat Mar 30 07:21:35 CET 2013

On Sat, Mar 30, 2013 at 12:40 PM, Maciej Fijalkowski <fijall at gmail.com> wrote:

On Fri, Mar 29, 2013 at 6:33 PM, Nick Coghlan <ncoghlan at gmail.com> wrote:

I am accepting Todd Rovito's and Terry Reedy's PEP 434, officially declaring IDLE to be an application bundled with Python, with the contents of "Lib/idlelib" exempt from the usual "no new features in maintenance releases" rule.

As stated in the PEP, this isn't carte blanche to do major rewrites in maintenance releases, merely acknowledgement that, when in doubt, we better serve our users by treating IDLE as a bundled application and making it behave consistently across all supported versions than we do by treating it as a library first and an application second. Hopefully this clarification, and the stated goal of supporting IDLE as a high quality cross-platform default starting point for new Python users that aren't already accustomed to the command line and editing text files directly, will make it easier for the IDLE developers to focus on making IDLE excel at that task. Regards, Nick. Does that mean that mainstream idle development should move out of the python tree?

That will ultimately be up to the IDLE developers. However, I don't expect it to happen any time soon, as remaining in the CPython repo allows them to easily re-use the existing buildbot fleet as they try to build out a decent test suite, and also means they don't have to spend their time working out a completely new development workflow rather than working on IDLE as it exists now.

Past experience also suggests that maintaining things in the CPython repo and cutting periodic external releases (if the IDLE developers ever choose to do that) works a lot better than trying to periodically reintegrate an externally maintained tool.

Cheers, Nick.

-- Nick Coghlan | ncoghlan at gmail.com | Brisbane, Australia

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