I think your biggest initial recoil to the response you got was in the request that you submit a patch. You thought, "Geez, I just want one friggin' error message changed, and they want me to learn the whole Python development environment." Given your newbiness with Python, probably a better response to you would be, "Submit this as a feature request at the SF tracker page. If you really feel ambitious, put together a patch to go with it, it will increase the likelihood of getting accepted about 50X."
A couple of other notes: - The core developers do post here, but the real core Python development discussions go on on the pydev mailing list. - Please recognize that you did get at least one response from John Machin, who scanned the code for this simple error message, and found that the impact was actually in about a dozen places (not uncommon when peeling away at the onion of source code, you've probably seen this yourself). This gave all of us a better appreciation of the size of the effort required for what initially seemed like a 30-second job. (BTW, there are *never* any 30-second jobs, especially in a package the size of Python.) So let me echo the effbot and ask that you submit this at the feature request tracker page on SF - I think you've spent more time in posting to this thread than it would have taken to submit this request. If you don't want to learn the Python dev environment, that's fine, you might consider composing a pydev mailing list submission making your case on the merits of implementing some user-friendliness features, such as more explanatory error messages. But the plain truth is, patches speak louder than words, on pydev even moreso than c.l.py. -- Paul -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list