[Python-Dev] Moving bugs and patches through the pipeline more quickly

[Tim Peters]

[Jeremy Hylton]
> When we were working on Python 2.0, PythonLabs made a
> serious commitment to keep the list of bugs on one page.
> Lots of people fixed bugs to achieve that goal, and more
> processing power will definitely help.

Note that we had full-time jobs working on Python then too.  Well, not
entirely:  at the end of the BeOpen run, all of PythonLabs was unemployed,
so we got to spend 1200% of every day volunteering to finish 2.0.

> One other thing that helped was that I spent many hours each
> week tracking bugs and making sure someone was working on
> them.  I intend to pick that task up again for Python 2.3.
> It would be great if there were more developers to lean on
> for the bugs.

During the times I did that task, I spent about 30 hours per week on bug +
patch triage alone.

It would be hard to overestimate how much concerted effort it would take to
get back to "one page" again; the SF stats (I think only admins can view the
reports) show that we're falling further behind month by month.  The
"Feature Requests" tracker may as well be a trash can.

OTOH, we could make a lot of progress very quickly by agreeing to drop
Python support for all save the OS + compiler Guido happens to use <wink>.

so-long-hpux-and-win9x-ly y'rs  - tim