On Mon, Apr 23, 2012 at 9:27 AM, Alexandre Vassalotti <alexan...@peadrop.com> wrote: > On Sun, Apr 22, 2012 at 6:12 PM, <mar...@v.loewis.de> wrote: >> Of course, this being free software, anybody can spend time on whatever >> they >> please, and this should not make anybody feel sad. You just don't get >> merits >> if you work on stuff that nobody cares about. > > > Yes, of course. I don't want to discourage anyone to investigate this > option—in fact, I would very much like to see myself proven wrong. But, if I > understood Stefan correctly, he is proposing to have a GSoC student to do > the work, to which I would feel uneasy about since we have no idea how > valuable this would be as a contribution.
So long as it's made clear to the students applying that it's a proof of concept that may return a negative result (i.e. "it was tried, it proved to be a bad idea") I don't see a problem with it. The freedom to try out multiple ideas in parallel is one of the great strengths of open source. We've had GSoC students try unsuccessful experiments in the past and have gained useful information as a result (e.g. the main reason I know the Import Engine API proposed in the deferred PEP 406 isn't adequate as currently written is because of the design level problems Greg found when implementing it last summer. The currently documented design simply doesn't achieve the full objectives of the PEP) Cheers, Nick. -- Nick Coghlan | ncogh...@gmail.com | Brisbane, Australia _______________________________________________ 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
