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Ques From CS Grad Student

Martin v. Löwis martin at v.loewis.de
Mon Dec 1 01:43:21 EST 2003 
claird at 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
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