[Python-Dev] collections.sortedtree (original) (raw)

Stephen J. Turnbull stephen at xemacs.org
Sat Mar 29 08:46:48 CET 2014

Tres Seaver writes:

I'm mostly arguing the FLOSS project

You mean "a (mostly) volunteer-supported" FLOSS project, no?

should feel free to ignore

Given the above qualification, you can put a period here, as far as I'm concerned. My question is "what does Python want to ignore?", not "is it allowed to ignore?"

high-maintenance-cost

What "high" maintenance cost? A stdlib addition is a marginal increase in cost. Do too many, and it's a serious burden, of course. So there needs to be some hurdle that any addition must clear, and that barrier becomes higher in proportion to the "code base to developers who actually do maintenance" ratio. But I think the question should be "how high?" not "can they pay?"

commercial concerns until those concerns bring either blook (funded developer time) or treasure (pooled to pay for the same time) to the table to pay for them.

I really don't think commercial profit as the motive for a request, or ability to pay, should be an important reason to ignore user wants. This smacks of the proposals for "ransom software", which (a) sort of turns the principle of volunteer FLOSS on its head (if that doesn't bother most of the developers, no problem, but for one it bothers me), and (b) doesn't actually work AFAICT (it's not quite the same as "crowdfunding", which does work).

It's rather the reverse: I believe we should be prepared to deal with the conflict of interest that results when some of the developers are offered money to provide cater to such concerns[1] where the community doesn't think the benefit is that high.

Footnotes: [1] Should not be that hard in this community, but that is the issue IMO.

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