Let me try to respond coherently to questions and comments from multiple
posts.
1. While Idle is not maintained as well as I and some people would wish,
it is untrue to say that 'Idle is not maintained'. It was not true a
year ago, 6 months ago, and is not now.
2. In recent years, tkinter has been less well maintained than Idle and
pretty much nothing had been done for awhile until Serhiy Storchaka dug
into it about 6 months ago. He has greatly expanded the tk/tkinter test
suite and fixed several bugs, including some that initially manifested
as 'Idle bugs'.
3. For several years, I believe, K.B.Kaiser was the Idle 'quarterback',
but he moved on to PSF work a few years ago and has done little Idle
work since. At the moment, I seem to be the person spending the most
time on Idle. More help is needed.
KBK applied patches to whatever versions he felt appropriate.
Development after him he stopped working on Idle was hobbled by
uncertainty, debate, and disagreement about whether other developers
could do the same, and with what patches. Since PEP 434 was approved
last March, working on Idle has been more pleasant. Most patches are
applied to all current versions without fuss.
There currently is no one in charge of a 'grand plan'. PEP 434
sidestepped the issue of 'approval' for big changes. For the rest of
Python and the stdlib, big changes normally start with a pre-PEP or
discussion on pydev or python-ideas.
4. My personal priorities are 'crash' issues, other fixes and
improvements that benefit me, and continuing development on a test suite
that should make it easier to patch Idle without introducing too many
regressions.
There is no developer guide for Idle. Idlelib currently comprises about
70 modules, mostly one class per file, with CamelCase.py names matching
the class names. For a couple a reasons, I would like to consolidate
some files and rename the rest to lowercase names. However, I would not
think of doing so until *all* .py files are imported by the test suite,
to verify that all imports within each file work continue to work after
changes. I am not sure who would have be involved in approving such a
proposal.
My personal dream for Idle (in 3.5) is to have multiple multi-tabbed
panes. I have a wide-screen monitor and I sometimes work with three Idle
windows open side by side. For instance, when working on Idle I might
have a Shell window, an Editor window for idlelib/xyz.py, and another
Editor window for idle_test/test_xyz.py. Sometimes I would like to be
able to switch the latter two to abc.py tabs without closing the xyz
tabs. I presume others might do the same with their own code and test
files. I am aware that there is a patch for one multi-tabbed pane. Once
that is working, adding an option to have two or three such panes should
be feasible.
5. Sean asked "How can I help??!!! Grab some bugs from the bug tracker?"
In essence, yes. In theory, every bug should be verified on Windows,
Linux, and Mac with (currently) 2.7, 3.3, and 3.4. Ditto for patches.
Some issues probably need more discussion of options for action. Also
look at the developer guide on the site and the core-mentorship list.
--
Terry Jan Reedy
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