anatoly techtonik writes: > I would vote for allowing student work on community infrastructure > tasks. Tracker, Wiki, Web site management tools are all outdated and > everybody who cares agrees that they've seen a better tools.
I've also seen *much* worse tools in actual use. You don't have to look any farther than macports.org and GNU Savannah for examples of implementations of individual tools that are much worse, and overall usability that is clearly worse, than Python's environment. Over and over again I have seen short-term volunteers pick the best- reputed software of the day, run out of steam just getting the old data ported over to the new host software, leaving behind a disgrace. (This is what happened to MacPorts Trac, it would seem -- it took 4 years for them to get an explanation of how to search for bugs on a given port on the top page of the issue tracker, and you still have to type queries like "?PORT=python26" by hand in the browser address field![1]) In other cases, the old data is never successfully ported at all (a common way to migrate from one VCS to another). So while improving the infrastructure is clearly a good thing, it is not a good idea to have people without *long-term* commitment to maintenance *changing the tools themselves*. I would recommend changing the tools only if *current* maintainers are either planning to step down (and so we face the problem of how to support maintenance in the future in any case), or are willing to supervise (ie, the people who will come back and fix problems in the future find the proposed "improvements" to be real improvements). Eg, MvL should be intimately involved in any move to use different software for the tracker. If the GSoC student(s) is (are) willing to work within the constraints of the existing software (ie, incremental improvements), then the constraints on mentors could be substantially relaxed to any of the senior folks who have recently contributed in those areas. Footnotes: [1] Actually, it may be even worse than it looks -- IIUC, macosforge has paid staff! _______________________________________________ Python-Dev mailing list Python-Dev@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-dev Unsubscribe: http://mail.python.org/mailman/options/python-dev/archive%40mail-archive.com
