Wanted: Win32-savvy developers for core Python
A python-dev post from Steve Holden gave rise to a wider discussion about the effectiveness of the buildbot system. But also to the question of having more people involved in core Python development who are knowledgeable about the Windows aspects of the core and the stdlib.
To get involved you certainly don’t need to be a Windows guru, nor a Python guru. You don’t need to have oodles of time on your hands. (Although all of the above would help). You do need a willingness to chase down occasionally obscure failing code paths and propose and implement patches. Or workarounds. Or documentation improvements. At present there is a very small number of us watching and fixing win32 issues and, speaking for myself, I have very little time available to help. The more people there are, each of which may have very little time, the more time is available overall to help Python develop and improve.
If you’d like to get involved but haven’t bothered previously, please bother now.
If you’d like to get involved but aren’t sure what to do, ping me or drop into #python-dev on IRC or just go to the Python bug tracker and look for Windows-related problems. (That search isn’t exhaustive as it relies on someone setting the Component field, but it certainly brings some results back).
Guido’s recently expressed a wish to give more people commit privileges, and MSDN have in the past generously provided free licences to allow core developers to develop and test on different Windows and Visual Studio versions.
There’s documentation on python.org for developers, and a new in-progress document by Brian Curtin on the Python sprints site.
Even if your contribution is to confirm that a bug still applies, or has been fixed, or to add tests to an undertested module which you use yourself, or to clarify or add some documentation, it will still be a very useful addition.
Mike Driscoll said,
Wrote on August 5, 2010 @ 2:52 pm
I can probably spare some time here and there to help out. However, I never figured out VS2003 and I don’t have a copy of VS2008. Do you have any recommendations for how to learn it?
tim said,
Wrote on August 5, 2010 @ 2:57 pm
The great thing is: for Python development you don’t need to “learn” VS at all. Install a (free) copy of VS2008 Express and check out the Python source from Subversion. Then in a command window:
cd (path to root of checkout)
tools\buildbot\external.bat
cd (path to root of checkout)\pcbuild
env.bat
build.bat -d
and you end up with a python_d.exe which is a debug build of Python. I can explain this in more detail if you want, or the docs I linked to in the post have the same or similar approaches described.
Mike Driscoll said,
Wrote on August 5, 2010 @ 8:21 pm
Alright. I’ll give that a try. Thanks!
- Mike
Tim Brown said,
Wrote on August 13, 2010 @ 9:08 am
The problem I’ve always hit is not being able to get the sources out.
I have yet to find a Windows based tool which I can make work. Which is more than likely a combination of the NTLM proxy we have at work and me not understanding the instructions :)
tim said,
Wrote on August 13, 2010 @ 9:15 am
@Tim Brown: can you elaborate? I’ve used svn/TortoiseSVN and hg/TortoiseHg successfully. Obviously they all use http:// so if you do have proxy issues that might be why. The mercurial mirror at http://code.python.org/hg has downloadable snapshots, in case that helps.
Feel free to contact me directly or to ask on the mailing lists if you still can’t get them.