Ques From CS Grad Student

[suenacita1]

Hi. I'm a masters student at the George Washington University
currently taking an Open Source Software Development course. One of
our assignments was to do a presentation on an open source project
and i chose Python. I have most of my presentation done but had a
couple questions where I want the help of the Python community to
help me answer.

1. How many members are involved directly, and how many peripherally?
2. What do you use to drive releases?
3. How often does the project release major and minor revisions?
4. What tools do they use to manage the source?
5. How does the Python project resolve conflicts between members?

I'd greatly appreciate some feedback. Thanks in advance.

Swati

[Peter Hansen]

suenacita1 wrote:

Hi. I'm a masters student at the George Washington University
currently taking an Open Source Software Development course. One of
our assignments was to do a presentation on an open source project
and i chose Python. I have most of my presentation done but had a
couple questions where I want the help of the Python community to
help me answer.

1. How many members are involved directly, and how many peripherally?
2. What do you use to drive releases?
3. How often does the project release major and minor revisions?
4. What tools do they use to manage the source?
5. How does the Python project resolve conflicts between members?

I'm sorry to say it, but the fact that you haven't got an answer to
question 3, at least, hints strongly that you've made very little effort
at all to research this on your own!

Go to www.python.org and spend a few minutes in surfing and thought
and you'll at least answer that one question on your own.

I suspect several of the other questions would be almost as easily
answered, perhaps with reference to the list archives.

And some of the questions are next to useless, and appear to be
repeated verbatim from some generic questionnaire that everyone
in the course is expected to use. "Drive releases"? What is that
supposed to mean? The text editor used? The revision control
system? The process? What type of car they used to get to the
sprints? :-)

-Peter

[Martin v. Löwis]

Peter Hansen <pe***@engcorp.com> writes:

1. How many members are involved directly, and how many peripherally?
2. What do you use to drive releases?
3. How often does the project release major and minor revisions?
4. What tools do they use to manage the source?
5. How does the Python project resolve conflicts between members?
I'm sorry to say it, but the fact that you haven't got an answer to
question 3, at least, hints strongly that you've made very little effort
at all to research this on your own!

Likewise, answers for question 1 are also very easy to find, as is
question 4 (actually, once 4 is answered, 1 falls out automatically,
atleast partially).
And some of the questions are next to useless, and appear to be
repeated verbatim from some generic questionnaire that everyone
in the course is expected to use. "Drive releases"? What is that
supposed to mean? The text editor used? The revision control
system? The process? What type of car they used to get to the
sprints? :-)

I think the OP would be satisfied if he found the relevant PEP.

Regards,
Martin

P.S. This looks too much like homework for me to give a more useful
answer.

[John J. Lee]

ma****@v.loewis.de (Martin v. Löwis) writes:

Peter Hansen <pe***@engcorp.com> writes: [...] P.S. This looks too much like homework for me to give a more useful
answer.

(S)he did openly state that it was for a presentation required for the
course -- (s)he's not trying to sneak it past you.

Often, such presentations in undergraduate courses are mostly for
practicing public speaking and putting together a talk, rather than
anything to do with the academic content, so it's not necessarily
"cheating" to ask for info.

I agree (s)he doesn't seem to have done the easy stuff before posting,
though.
John

[Peter Hansen]

"John J. Lee" wrote:

ma****@v.loewis.de (Martin v. Löwis) writes:

Peter Hansen <pe***@engcorp.com> writes: [...]

P.S. This looks too much like homework for me to give a more useful
answer.

(S)he did openly state that it was for a presentation required for the
course -- (s)he's not trying to sneak it past you.

Often, such presentations in undergraduate courses are mostly for
practicing public speaking and putting together a talk, rather than
anything to do with the academic content, so it's not necessarily
"cheating" to ask for info.

(S)he also clearly stated the nature of the course, and from that
description (and the fact that this is a *Master's* student, FCOL)
it seems clear to me that actually doing the research is one of the
purposes.
I agree (s)he doesn't seem to have done the easy stuff before posting,
though.

I guess we're all agreed on that. :-)

Between my and Martin's replies, the bulk of the question is
effectively answered with a little more legwork. Shouldn't really
be a problem to do it, and come back with perhaps one or two followup
questions that ask for, say, clarification on what the OP learned about
question 5, provided this isn't also an assignment that is due tomorrow!

-Peter

[Cameron Laird]

In article <m3************@mira.informatik.hu-berlin.de>,
Martin v. Löwis <ma****@v.loewis.de> wrote:

Peter Hansen <pe***@engcorp.com> writes:

> 1. How many members are involved directly, and how many peripherally?

[Martin v. Löwis]

cl****@lairds.com (Cameron Laird) writes:

> 1. How many members are involved directly, and how many peripherally?

[...] While I'm a leading advocate of the proposition that
one can know answers without understanding their cor-
responding questions, in this case I don't get either.
Give me a hint: what does 1. mean?
I interpret this question as: How many people contribute to Python in
a steady way, and how many people do so occasionally?

To the first part, the answer is "56", counting the number of people
who have CVS write access. For the second part, I'd count the people
in Misc/ACKS.
Here's what *I* suspect is the answer: it's more inter-
esting to describe the different categories of
pertinent involvement in Python development than to try
to quantify them (although I have nothing against doing
both).

You could also count the people that ever made a release, which would
be a number below 10 (although I don't know myself what the number
would be). Then you could count people that ever reported a bug, which
would be larger than the number of people in Misc/ACKS.

Regards,
Martin