[Python-Dev] Encouraging developers

[A.M. Kuchling]

On Tue, Mar 06, 2007 at 09:06:22AM +0000, Phil Thompson wrote:
> My point is simply that the effort required to review patches seems to be a 
> problem. Perhaps the reasons for that need to be looked at and the process 
> changed so that it is more effective. At the moment people just seem be 
> saying "that's the way it is because that's the way it's got to be".

Unfortunately I think the effort required is intrinsic to reviewing
patches.  Trivial or obviously correct patches get applied quickly, so
the remaining bugs and patches are the ones that are hard to fix.

For example, our oldest bug is http://www.python.org/sf/214033, opened
2000-09-11, and is that (x?)? is reported as an error by the SRE regex
parser; the PCRE engine and Perl both accept it.  Fixing it requires
changing sre_parse, figuring out what to do (should it be equivalent
to '(x?)' or to '(x)?', and then being very sure that no other
patterns are broken by the change.  I suspect that fixing this bug
properly by researching the right answer, implementing it, and adding
tests would take me a half-day's worth of work.  If modifying
sre_parse is very difficult, it could take longer.

--amk