[python-committers] Comments on moving issues to GitHub

[Terry Reedy]

On 6/1/2018 7:07 PM, Mariatta Wijaya wrote:
> Yup, the "mystery" was just for fun 😛
> There is no secret. I've been thinking that we should start using GitHub 
> issues instead of the b.p.o.
> 
> I realized not everyone was able to get to the language summit, and I 
> fully intended to update python-committers with this idea.
> I just haven't been reading the mailing list for sometime until today.
> 
> For those who missed it, some resources:
> 
> 1. My language summit slides 
> (https://speakerdeck.com/mariatta/mariattas-python-language-summit-2018-presentation)

"Old and languishing issues should just be closed / ignored"

I disagree with doing this blindly, and I would be mightily annoyed if 
someone did so with IDLE issues and hide valuable ideas and code.  For 
example:

In Sept 2006, Tal Einat suggested that IDLE's class browser, based on 
the pyclbr module, should report nested classed.
https://bugs.python.org/issue1612262

In August 2009, Guilherme Polo submitted patches for pyclbr and IDLE 
that also supported nested functions.  https://bugs.python.org/issue6691
I discovered the issue and approved of the idea in Sept 2015

In June and July 2017, Cheryl Sabella and I updated, rewrote, finished, 
and merged both patches.

To deal with issues better, we need

1. More core developers, so more modules can have maintainers.

2. Better support for core developers in the tracker.

2a. The ability to tag issues with the module (or perhaps modules) that 
an issue more pertains to.

2b. Associated (linked) manager or dashboard for issues pertaining to a 
module or group of modules.

There are currently about 60 idlelib module and 250 IDLE issues.  To not 
go crazy or become paralyzed, I keep a list (in a file) organized by 
topics, which mostly correspond to modules.  Since I started this, I 
have closed perhaps 40-50 issues.  For one thing, collecting together 
issues pertaining to a topic/module makes it easy to spot out of date 
and duplicate issues.

If I could tag IDLE issues with module names and retrieve them by 
module, that would partly duplicate what I have done.  It would also be 
nice to have the line online, and public, with issue numbers linking 
back to issues.  It would be nice if tagging an issue caused it to be 
automatically added to the appropriate sublist.

Would moving to github make such a substantial improvement?

> There are 3 bonus slides at the end which I did not get to cover, 
> because we were running late and it was lunchtime. (in the end, we were 
> 3 hrs overtime.)

Automerge: should signal separate from 'I approve of this PR'.  Commit 
message can be put in a labelled comment.  I have started editing the 
initial commit message.

tjr