[python-committers] Suggestion: A PSF grant for running a "Core Dev Mentorship Program"

[Steve Dower]

On 02Nov2018 0933, Victor Stinner wrote:
> Mentoring is an investment in the long term. Is it better to pay
> someone to review and merge PRs?
> 
> Reviewing PRs is also a way to help and train contributors. It's not
> very different from mentoring, depending on your definition of
> mentoring :-)

The problem here is that most of the reviews require either specialised 
knowledge of the area being changed (essentially the ability to predict 
the flow-on impact of any change), or a strong decision that the change 
is good. This severely limits the people who can approve most PRs.

Every time I start going through the list of PRs, I find that I'm 
obviously not the right person to approve the change, or that I should 
not be unilaterally approving the change (without discussing it on 
python-dev). Which means that you can't pay me to review most PRs, 
because I simply can't do it :) So who do we get to review them?

Without a stated direction/vision for CPython, it's very hard for any 
individual developer to make unilateral decisions on many PRs. And since 
there are many major areas, each with their own "team" or "expert", we 
really need those maintainers to be reviewing PRs in their areas, and 
also feeling empowered and supported to make leadership-like decisions 
for their areas.

Mentoring is certainly the solution to the latter, provided the current 
experts are mentoring new experts in their area, and landing a 
governance model that helps us decide what sorts of other changes are 
good for Python solves the former. Simply paying "someone" doesn't help.

Cheers,
Steve