Unfortunate exception on dict item assignment (and why aren't slices hashable?)

[Michael Hudson]

I think I've ranted, along these lines, in this forum, before.
However, SF has just gone down for maintenence as I try to comment on
a bug, so I'm feeling these issues (and am being frustrated in my
attempts to "do something useful instead").

Francois Pinard <pinard at iro.umontreal.ca> writes:

> [Fredrik Lundh]
> 
> > Aahz wrote:
> > > (Despite my regular comments on python-dev, I don't contribute
> > > code because SF refuses to make changes to allow Lynx to work
> > > correctly.)
> 
> > maybe someone with an SF account could help you out?
> 
> Let me say (and probably repeat) that imposing Web browsers to users,
> or bug trackers with sorrow editing interfaces, and asking users to get
> acquainted with the classification system and various work idiosyncrasies
> of each and every maintainer, package by package, is insane.

        W   W EEEEE       K  K N   N  OOO  W   W 
        W   W E           K K  NN  N O   O W   W 
        W W W EEE         KK   N N N O   O W W W 
        WW WW E           K K  N  NN O   O WW WW 
        W   W EEEEE       K  K N   N  OOO  W   W 

that the SF trackers are not ideal.  We are trying, hoping, to move to
a friendly system (roundup) more under our control, but there's this
small matter of time...

> The result is that users have either to choose on which few packages they
> will specialise on, or else, to merely stop contributing.  In the former
> case, a maintainer is building his own specialised crowd, which may be
> admittedly good for his project alone.  In the latter case, a maintainer
> is pushing users away.  But in all cases, this is an overall social lost.

If we push away contributors who do not have time to adjust to using a
different tool for the Python project, maybe that's not such a bad
thing.

Submitting a patch to Python implies a certain amount of commitment.
You just cannot expect the (volunteer!) maintainers to fall down and
be grateful that someone has deigned to send a patch their way.

> I miss the times when it was a simple matter to offer contributions,
> maybe humble and small, yet possibly numerous, to any package in sight.
> Maintainers praising want-to-be-sophisticated machinery should use it all
> their soul if they feel like it, but without forcing users into their bag.

Look, we get more patches than we can cope with.  We *have* to have
some way of organising our backlog.  What do you suggest instead?
That you just email a patch to one of the maintainers and have them
shuffle it into the structured tracker, thus taking time away from
them that they could be using to assess the patch?  Get real.  Or,
better, offer to help set up roundup on python.org.

And frankly, the pain of using suboptimal trackers is felt *much more*
by the maintainers than those who submit patches to us.

Cheers,
mwh

-- 
  [2. More type system hacking --- text/plain; type-argh.diff]
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