[Python-Dev] Appeal for reviews

[Stephen J. Turnbull]

Janzert writes:
 > On 4/13/2014 2:36 AM, Stephen J. Turnbull wrote:
 > [snip]
 > > My claim is that in current circumstances,
 > > core-mentorship would be a more *effective* channel because
 > >
 > >   - core-mentorship is *explicitly* for poking Those Who Can Help
 > >     (among other requests for help);
 > >
 > >   - a surprisingly large (to me, anyway :-) fraction of core committers
 > >     and people who may not be "core" but do a lot of mentoring for
 > >     central projects like IDLE do hang out there; and
 > >
 > >   - when reading core-mentorship their "mentor modes" will be engaged,
 > >     whereas on python-dev they will often be mostly interested in a
 > >     particular thread.
 > >
 > 
 > It saddens me that the core-mentorship list has grown into the primary 
 > acceptable place to ask these getting into core development questions. 
 > Any question answered there can never benefit the wider community since 
 > it is kept a closed list

That is false.  The list is open, anybody interested can join the list
and read the archives.

 > for the specific purpose of keeping its archives out of public
 > view.

Nobody said core-mentorship is the primary place for getting into core
development questions.  I said that for requesting review of your
patches, it's probably a better venue than here.

However, I take issue with your implied opinion that a lot of the
discussion on core-mentorship is of general interest.  AFAICS most
questions that are being asked are FAQs and requests for review.  Most
are handled well by the dev guide, and the answers don't belong on
this list because they contain little new content *of general
interest*.

Of course there's some loss of information to the "wider community"
due to the (tiny) cost of subscribing and lack of indexing by search
engines, but the benefit of directing new developers to
core-mentorship is that S/N increases for *both* sets of users (not
just the subscribers to -dev, but the new developers, too).

What bothers me is a *much* larger leak: the issue tracker.  Although
I suppose that technically speaking it's a little easier to access and
indexed by Google, there is surely a lot of implementation and style
advice that just isn't going to be accessible to anybody who doesn't
already know it -- because without that knowledge they won't have the
search terms needed to find it in Google.  I don't, and I imagine you
don't, think it's a good idea to abandon the tracker and discuss those
issues here instead.  Eventually we'll have technology to aggregate
that, I hope.