Python Developer's Guide

This page contains resources for people who want to help develop and maintain Python itself.

Getting Started

• Tools
• Getting Set Up
• Intro to Development
• Suggested Tasks

Source Code

Python's source code is currently kept in a Subversion repository.

• Subversion instructions
• Subversion browser (master copy of the source code)
• Daily snapshots of the Python source tree

The developers intend to switch to Mercurial. The transition isn't complete; the following links describe the plan.

• Mercurial mirrors of the various CPython branches.
• PEP 374: On switching to a DVCS
• PEP 385: Migrating from svn to Mercurial

Some Mercurial repositories at http://hg.python.org are in use for some sub-projects, such as lib2to3, a benchmark suite, and the unittest module.

Resources

• Issue Tracker
  • Bug Search Browser Plugin (Firefox)
• Buildbot - continuously runs tests against the current source code.
• Python-Dev Mailing List
• Python Enhancement Proposals (PEPs) - Describe new language features, release procedures, and schedules.
• Daily OS X installers

Policies and Procedures

• Issue Workflow
• Patch Submission Guidelines
• Developer FAQ - Tips on SVN, SSH and patch submission
• Documentation development - how to improve the documentation
• Python.org Maintenance and Administration