[Python-Dev] Contributing to Python

[Titus Brown]

On Thu, Jan 03, 2008 at 09:55:44PM +0100, Christian Heimes wrote:
-> Jeroen Ruigrok van der Werven wrote:
-> > You don't put the bar high for newbies on the Python project eh? :)
-> > 
-> > I am assumign that most of those contributions code-wise need a fair amount of
-> > knowledge of Python's internals?
-> 
-> It's neither impossible nor too hard to get involved. I got from
-> "haven't done serious C coding in years" to "Python core developer with
-> full svn access" in less than 9 months. OK, I've more than 5 years of
-> Python experience but you don't need it to contribute.
-> 
-> You can start by updating or enhancing the existing documentation,
-> writing new docs and tutorials or updating the unit test suite. New
-> tests need to be written and existing test should be ported to the new
-> unit test module.

As far as I am aware, we/GHOP have patches for all of the tests in 2.6
=> unittest or doctest.  They have not all been applied yet, but that
will come soon.

Speaking as someone with a few years experience in Python and quite a
bit of C knowledge, it is not at all easy to come up with a way to dive
into the core code.  For GHOP, it was a bit of a struggle to come up
with tasks; I ended up with three main sources of tasks:

 - a blog post asking people about their favorite poorly documented
   module;

 - the 3.0 spreadsheet and some grepping, to figure out which tests
   still needed to be ported over to unittest/doctest;

 - a test coverage analysis to figure out which modules were largely
   untested;

A parent of a GHOP student asked us if we could somehow come up with
a suggested task list for new contributors (not just GHOP students).
While this could be a lot of work, I think the contributions from GHOP
to core in the areas of test coverage, test porting, and module
documentation indicate that this kind of outreach may be very effective.
If you have ideas on how to keep such a task list fresh and up-to-date
as well as populated with good, simple tasks, I'm interested in hearing
from you!

cheers,
--titus