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

[Antoine Pitrou]

Le 02/11/2018 à 17:30, Victor Stinner a écrit :
> 
>> There are much simpler and
>> more approachable projects out there if they'd like to learn
>> contributing to open source software.
> 
> Exactly. This is why we fail to convert volunteer contributors to core
> developers. They fly away because pull requests are not reviewed,
> whereas other projects are faster than us to review PRs, give better
> feedback and has less strict on quality/backward compat.

To be honest, often when PRs are reviewed the PR author never comes back
to address the points raised.  At least, that seems to have been my
experience several times recently.  Perhaps people expect their
contributions to be reviewed in a very short timeframe and they lose
patience afterwards?  That sounds like a plausible explanation.

It's also the case that CPython bugs are more and more obscure, and
probably less rewarding to fix because of that.  Take for example this fix:
https://github.com/python/cpython/pull/10305

It's nice that someone bothered to fix this issue.  But the underlying
concern is also completely fringy :-)  Usually you don't want to send
several gigabytes of data at once on a multiprocessing connection,
because that's obviously more inefficient than finding a way not to
duplicate the data.  So the fix is good for correctness (and it should
also be a very simple fix, even with the compatibility hack added in),
but not very relevant if you care a little bit about optimizing your system.

To have more interesting issues to work on for new contributors, we
should start adding new standard library modules (and/or new major core
features) again!

Regards

Antoine.