https://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-committers/2017-March/004307.html

Python Development Workflow

See also CPython infrastructure and History of Python.

Source Code

Python Forge and Bug Tracker

Discourse and Mailing Lists

Rietveld (2008-2017)

Rietveld was used for code reviews:

History (2009-2010):

Workflow in 2010-2018 (before GitHub, buildbots testing code once merged)

Buildbot was only running after changes were pushed upstream. It was common that a change broke the Windows support, and so core devs pushed an “attempt to fix Windows” commit, and then a second one, etc.

To propose a change, a contributor had to open an issue in the bug tracker (Roundup at bugs.python.org), and attach a patch file. A core developer had to

  • Download the patch locally

  • Apply the patch file

  • Fix conflicts: when the day was older than 1 day, conflicts were very likely

Misc/NEWS was basically always in conflict, especially on merges.

Changes were first fixed in the oldest supported branch, and then forward-ported to newer branches. For example, fixed in 2.6, and ported to 2.7, 3.0 and 3.1.

When Subversion was used, a Subversion “property” (in practice, a text file tracked by Subversion) listed the revision number of all “merged” changes. For example, when a change made in the 2.6 branch was merged into the 2.7 branch, it was added to this list. It was likely that this property file was in conflict. Sadly, it was a text file made of a single line with thousands of revision numbers. Text editors are not convenient to edit such file. It was barely possible to fix a conflict in this property.

A new tool to review (comment) patches was linked to Roundup: Rietveld. It was possible to generate a patch from a fork the Mercurial repository, and then get a review page. Rietveld supported multiple revisions of the same change. Drawback: the tool was not well integrated with Roundup. For example, there was no way to unsubscribe from a review.

GitHub Python organization

GitHub CPython project

GitHub bots

cherry-pick for backports

miss-islington

Mariatta is the primary maintainer. The bot runs in Heroku.

The bot runs cherry-picker to backport changes in CPython.

GitHub CLA bot