Not to put words in Terry’s mouth, but I believe he’s almost ready to start
looking at integrating some of the broader UI changes I’ve been developing into
IDLE. I thought it would therefore be a good time to raise issues surrounding
what that process might look like.
While most IDLE changes recently have been in the form of standalone, fairly
independent patches, some of this work “feels” different, more like new,
partially experimental, development. In particular:
* many interdependent pieces, fairly hard to integrate individually
* parts likely needing usage feedback before being included/finalized
(or revised, or excluded)
* usage and iteration will bring out other issues not yet known
* limited automated testing, which even if more extensive would be
misleading as to “correctness”
As well, it would seem that a “(re-)launch” in one form or another would be
appropriate to get the word out and generate more interest from potential new
helpers. :-)
All of this feels more like an alpha-beta-release process (i.e. the whole thing
shows up at once) rather than incremental improvements over time and possibly
spanning several Python releases.
From a development point of view, I’d normally approach this as a separate
branch in the code repository, which would get integrated into the mainline on
release. (I’ve kinda been doing that as I work through things myself, via
github). What would be the best way to approach this for IDLE?
One possibility might be integrate things on the main (i.e. 3.6) branch, which
I’m presuming won’t have an actual release of any kind for quite some time.
That lets things get added more incrementally and tested by ourselves and
others without it being inadvertently dropped on unsuspecting folk. It would be
ok if at various times things were in an incomplete state.
After a significant amount of integration, refinement and revision we might get
to the point where as a group we’re “satisfied” with the new state of IDLE as a
whole, and those changes get ported all at once to 3.5.x and 2.7.x where they’d
actually hitting real people.
I’ll throw that out there anyway. I’m sure others have many different ideas on
this. Anyone care to share their thoughts?
Mark
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