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Python gears up for 2.6 and 3.0
Python gears up for 2.6 and 3.0
Posted Mar 20, 2008 16:01 UTC (Thu) by tomd (subscriber, #881)Parent article: Python gears up for 2.6 and 3.0
Is the bug tracker they're using proprietary? I'm rather astounded to read about a project with clearly smart people incapable of adding a "target release" type of field. Isn't that a basic issue tracker feature? And, though I hesitate to ask, is their bug tracker really front page news?
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Python gears up for 2.6 and 3.0
Posted Mar 24, 2008 19:06 UTC (Mon) by pboddie (guest, #50784) [Link]
No, Roundup is Free Software. They wanted to use a proprietary solution (offered gratis by the developers of that solution), but were asked to reconsider for a number of reasons; these included the obvious publicity, advocacy and technical benefits related to using a Python solution which is also Free Software, especially one which is regarded to be mature enough to do the job. The Python community does try and make its technology appealing to conservative software development types, but I think it is often easy to overlook the potential for negative publicity if such people then see that the developers producing the technology do not themselves use that technology to manage the project itself (so you'd get Slashdot headlines like "Python bug tracker uses closed, non-Python solution" and a hundred wisecracks following up on it). At the very least, if you're producing Free Software and attempting to get conservative people to use it, you should also send the signal that Free Software is good enough for you too. Had the previously favoured Java-based solution been Free Software, perhaps it would have been an uncontroversial choice, since one can always say that the benefits of open solutions are more important than technological details. There's no need to rewrite everything in one's favourite language if the existing solutions are usable enough, but the availability of suitable Free Software solutions in Python made it more likely that one of those solutions would eventually be chosen.