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[Python-Dev] Helping contributors with chores (do we have to?)

Antoine Pitrou solipsis at pitrou.net
Sun Jun 25 04:33:20 EDT 2017 
On Sat, 24 Jun 2017 21:37:46 -0700
Larry Hastings <larry at hastings.org> wrote:
> On 06/24/2017 09:14 PM, Serhiy Storchaka wrote:
> > Not only core developers make PRs for CPython. Since all non-trivial 
> > changes need to be mentioned in Misc/NEWS, blurb becomes a required 
> > tool for all committers.  
> 
> Well, no.  *Writing blurb-compatible files* becomes a required step for 
> all committers.  And blurb makes that easy.  But it's pretty easy to 
> write them by hand; that's why we pre-created the "next" directories, 
> and there are instructions in the dev guide.

Hmm.  If it were so easy, you wouldn't have felt the need to add that
functionality to blurb, right? :-)

This is touching a more general problem, though.  Before GitHub, we
(core developers) would take the patch submitted by a contributor, make
whatever minor changes were needed (e.g. Misc/NEWS) and push the
aggregate ourselves.  With GitHub, while it's possible to edit someone
else's PR, it's frankly a PITA (I've tried to do it once, I don't want
to try a second time unless GitHub makes it massively easier and less
footgunning-prone). So we have to rely on contributors to make the PR
merge-ready by themselves... which means spending some time guiding
them through the oh-so-exciting steps necessary to add the right
Misc/NEWS entry, or fix the occasional bit of reStructuredText
mis-syntax.

Regards

Antoine.
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