Paul Moore: > 3. There's nothing obvious I can do to move an issue forward. Sure, I > can make a comment, but that's about it. I'd like something that > stood a bit more chance of getting noticed (like a status change, or > maybe a list of people who think this is good to apply, which I can > add myself to).
Speaking for myself, I rarely spend any time going through the tracker looking for items I can help handle*. So one of the things I find *most* helpful is when someone adds me to the nosy list for a tracker issue, since that will drop an email into my issue tracker folder with a link straight to the issue. Obviously I'd prefer it if people only did that when I really can help, but I don't mind getting the occasional misdirected issue if it means that more problems in my areas of expertise are brought directly to my attention. (*I only spend a fairly limited amount of time on python at the moment, and keeping up with python-dev, python-3000, reviewing the two checkins list and looking into items that are brought directly to my attention fills that up pretty well) Tarek Ziadé wrote: > Since it is a hard and long process "to know it all" in Python, and > to become a core developer > > What about having two level of devs ? > > + core developers + standard library developers > > I mean, the standard library could be open ihmo to a wider range of > people, or maybe even having people specialized in some packages, > modules, even if they don't know anything about the C apis of the > core. > > Those "standard library developers" could be blessed to work on > specific areas of the standard library and "followed" by a core > developer that can just make sure everything goes in the right > direction without having too much extra work for that. I think you'll that most of the "core devs" have areas where we're confident of our domain knowledge and are happy to accept and commit patches, and other areas where we're willing to review things and provide recommendations, and then areas where we have next to no knowledge at all. The standard library is pretty huge, and outside a few generally useful core modules, which sections of it are useful to you depends greatly on what kind of application you're working on. To use myself as an example, if a bug or patch relating to the compiler , the import system, runpy, contextlib, functools or a few others areas is brought to my attention, I'll generally consider myself competent to both assess the problem and apply any fixes (I may not consider the issue *urgent*, or else I'll want to spend some time just mulling it over, so the tracker item may still hang around for a while, but I'll get to them eventually). Then there are a few other areas (such as threading and multiprocessing), where I'll take an active interest in matters (because it's code I either use, or am likely to use at some point), but usually defer to others when it comes to making the actual commits. This is particular so when areas have clear owners (e.g. Raymond for itertools, Jesse for multiprocessing, Facundo/Raymond for decimal) or are fairly complex and I know I haven't studied them enough to understand them properly (e.g. the memory allocator). And finally, there are large swathes of the standard library that I've never even used, let alone looked at in a code editor (such as nearly all of the network protocol and database libraries, as what I personally use Python for tends to be much lower level than that). For those areas, I don't really consider myself competent to even provide effective review, so I tend to ignore those patches completely. In the past, even Guido has explicitly deferred to the appropriate subject matter experts when it came to areas of the standard library he personally didn't use much. So I'd suggest thinking about developer responsibilities more in terms of areas of expertise rather than "levels" of developers. Those of us that happen to understand the guts of the compiler or the VM aren't more competent globally or more trusted than those maintaining the various modules in the standard library - just interested in different things. Cheers, Nick. -- Nick Coghlan | [EMAIL PROTECTED] | Brisbane, Australia --------------------------------------------------------------- _______________________________________________ Python-Dev mailing list Python-Dev@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-dev Unsubscribe: http://mail.python.org/mailman/options/python-dev/archive%40mail-archive.com
