python-dev summary, Jan. 16-31

[Andrew Kuchling]

Oleg Broytmann <phd at phd.pp.ru> writes:
>    Any chance you'll continue the summaries?

Not really.  All of this is sparked by my wanting to reduce the load,
really; I recently realized that I haven't hacked on *any* of my
projects (Oedipus, amkCrypto, etc.) lately.  Therefore I've dropped
out of my book club (one night a week), dropped the summaries, (two
nights every two weeks, or 15% of my evenings), and after 2.1final is
released I'll probably unsubscribe from python-dev, too.

So, to rescuing the summaries... For the information of potential
volunteers, I'll summarize the process.  Writing them isn't difficult
and can easily be done while watching TV -- I usually pull the mail
archive on my laptop and do just that.  They're just time-consuming,
taking up two evenings at a time.

1) Grab a copy of the mailbox archive for the month.

2) Load it up into mutt (or other MUA of choice), and delete messages 
   outside of the two-week period being summarized.

3) Sort the remaining messages by thread, and go through finding the 
   interesting threads.  What makes a thread interesting?

        * Threads discussing how to fix a particular bug,
          or tracing down a bug's root cause, can be quite lengthy but 
          usually aren't interesting. 

        * Minute discussions of language syntax are rarely interesting,
          and I think even Guido tunes them out after a while.

        * New proposals that spark off a discussion are interesting.
        * Discussions surrounding a PEP are interesting.

4) <time consuming but fun step> Read through each interesting thread,
   pulling out interesting quotes and summarizing the flow of the
   argument.  This is fun because you can introduce your own biases; I
   think this is why people become journalists.

5) <time consuming and tedious step> For each quote, find the URL for
   that message in the archives on mail.python.org, and link to it.
   This is painful; recently I've started spidering the archives with wget
   and grepping them in order to avoid ferreting through the indexes 
   over my modem connection.

   Thinking about it now, it would have been much easier on me to just
   do what Linux Weekly News does, and make a local copy of each
   message.  That means you wouldn't have to worry about links
   breaking (moving Mailman to mail.python.org required regenerating
   the archives, and the links in the October & November summaries are
   now all broken), and the author wouldn't have to hunt for the right
   message URL.  You'd lose the easy ability to follow the thread, of
   course.

6) The summary is written as plain ASCII, and it gets posted, and
   mailed to LWN and LinuxToday.  The HTML version is then just a
   matter of escaping <&>, turning the URLs into <A> tags with an Emacs
   macro, and putting <pre> tags around it; no fancy XML DTD...

--amk