On 07:44 pm, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
At no time will a policy "the community buildbots must be green" be
useful: the tests that run on these buildbots are not under our
control,
so if the tests test things we deem non-public we can't do anything
about it. (And we may have a hard time convincing project authors to
change the tests if we promised to make them run anyway.)
That's not what I'm suggesting.
If there is a legitimate disagreement between Python developers and
developers of a project about whether an API should continue to be
supported, then clearly, the Python developers get to win. Welcome to
open source.
However, I believe that the core team is not paying attention to other
projects breaking. I'm not saying that you want to make breaking
changes, or that bug reports are not dealt with, but the problem is that
dealing with these problems after the fact makes it _much_ more painful.
When you get to the release, and you have 30 bug reports due to other
projects breaking, they get triaged, some get left in, and some features
of lots of different projects are left broken. And many projects do not
bother to test with the beta.
If developers were simply presented with the results of their changes
immediately ("you broke twisted, django doesn't import, zope segfaults
and mercurial destroys your repository") then perhaps they would weigh
the benefits of compatibility differently, and do the trivial, obvious
fix immediately, rather than waiting 6 months and having to figure out
what the heck change caused the bug. I accept the fact that python core
development is done differently than i.e. Java development, and some
backward compatibility may simply be broken.
Case in point: changes to the warnings module being discussed in a
separate thread break a significant number of Twisted's tests, because
they remove functionality which is not public but is required to test
code that uses the warnings module. Would Brett have taken this into
account if he knew about it immediately when revision 62303 was
committed? Maybe not, but now that the code is written and done,
there's significantly less motivation to go back and fix it. At the
time it might have only been a few minutes' work to continue supporting
the use-case which Twisted needs. Brett wouldn't even have necessarily
needed to do the work: it would have been easier to convince a Twisted
developer to do the work it to keep the community buildbot green rather
than to make it a bit less red. Now, though, it's much easier to say
"oh well, that's private, you lose". I don't ascribe this to malice -
it really *would* be much harder to fix it now, for us as well as for
him.
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