[Python-Dev] Reorganize Python categories (Core, Library, ...)? (original) (raw)

Victor Stinner victor.stinner at gmail.com
Wed Oct 4 05:52:32 EDT 2017


Hi,

Python uses a few categories to group bugs (on bugs.python.org) and NEWS entries (in the Python changelog). List used by the blurb tool:

#.. section: Security #.. section: Core and Builtins #.. section: Library #.. section: Documentation #.. section: Tests #.. section: Build #.. section: Windows #.. section: macOS #.. section: IDLE #.. section: Tools/Demos #.. section: C API

My problem is that almost all changes go into "Library" category. When I read long changelogs, it's sometimes hard to identify quickly the context (ex: impacted modules) of a change.

It's also hard to find open bugs of a specific module on bugs.python.org, since almost all bugs are in the very generic "Library" category. Using full text returns "false positives".

I would prefer to see more specific categories like:

It's hard to find categories generic enough to not only contain a single item, but not contain too many items neither. Other ideas:

The best would be to have a mapping of a module name into a category, and make sure that all modules have a category. We might try to count the number of commits and NEWS entries of the last 12 months to decide if a category has the correct size.

I don't think that we need a distinct categoy for each module. We can put many uncommon modules in a generic category.

By the way, we need maybe also a new "module name" field in the bug tracker. But then comes the question of normalizing module names. For example, should "email.message" be normalized to "email"? Maybe store "email.message" but use "email" for search, display the module in the issue title, etc.

Victor



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