[Python-Dev] Updating turtle.py (original) (raw)

Terry Reedy tjreedy at udel.edu
Sun Jun 1 00:21:00 CEST 2014

On 5/31/2014 2:05 PM, "Martin v. Löwis" wrote:

Am 31.05.14 05:32, schrieb Terry Reedy:

I have two areas of questions about updating turtle.py. First the module itself, then a turtle tracker issue versus code cleanup policies.

A. Unlike most stdlib modules, turtle is copyrighted and licensed by an individual. ''' # turtle.py: a Tkinter based turtle graphics module for Python # Version 1.1b - 4. 5. 2009 # Copyright (C) 2006 - 2010 Gregor Lingl # email: glingl at aon.at ''' I am not sure what the copyright covers other than the exact text contributed, with updates, by Gregor. It certainly does not cover the API and whatever code he copied from the previous version (unless that was also by him, and I have no idea how much he copied when reimplementing). I don't think it should cover additions made by others either. Should there be another line to cover these? He should provide a contributor form, covering his past contributions. Would you like to contact him about this?

Thank you for the advice. I emailed him about contributor form, change notice in the file, and maintenance.

Adding a license up-front (as you propose) is counter-productive; the author may not agree to your specific licensing terms. If he was unwilling to agree to the contributor form (which I doubt, knowing him personally), the only option would be to remove the code from the distribution.

Responding today, I cautioned that clean-up only patches, such as she apparently would like to start with, are not in favor. I would not say that. I recall that I asked Gregor to make a number of style changes before he submitted the code, and eventually agreed to the code when I thought it was "good enough". However, continuing on that path sounds reasonable to me.

I am not sure what you mean by 'that path', to be continued on.

It is the mixing of clean-up patches with functional changes that is not in favor.

What I have understood from Guido is that 'blind' format changes, not part of working on the file, are not good as they could cause harm without direct benefit. On the otherhand, you are saying that if the code is reviewed, then the format changes should be separate, possibly with a commit note that they are not 'blind'.

Since she only marked the issue for 3.5, I also cautioned that 3.5-only cleanups would make fixing bugs in other issues harder. Is the code clean-up policy the same for all branches? I don't think that we should be taken hostage by merging restrictions of the DVCS - we switched to the DVCS precisely with the promise that merging would be easier. Given the number of bug fixes that the turtle module has seen,

which is miniscule in the last few years... I ran differ on the 3.4 and 3.5 versions of turtle.py and did not see any differences. So at the moment, forward porting is trivial.

I'd suggest that it is less work to restrict cleanup to 3.5, and then deal with any forward-porting of bug fixing when it actually happens.

This would make it non-trivial for any patch hitting a difference.

-- Terry Jan Reedy

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