Python Bug Day this Saturday

This Saturday, you have the opportunity of participating to the Python Bug Day. How would you like to be one of the contributors of Python? If you have ideas for improving parts of the official documentation, the standard library, the language itself, or if you have a patch waiting for a review that you would like to see committed, or if you just want to come and fix an existing bug, it’s your day!

Join us for an effort at closing some Python bugs and feature requests. Get quick feedback on your patches and bugfixes, learn how to submit and examine patches, and have fun chatting with the Python developers and other contributors. You don’t need to know the CPython codebase or process to join, just Python programming knowledge.

If you live in Montreal, come at Caravan to meet fellow hackers and take part in a physical sprint!

Please register to let us know how many people to expect. People from around the world are should join the #python-dev IRC channel to participate in the bug day.

This page contains all the information you need to get set up, see the list of bugs or learn about IRC: http://wiki.python.org/moin/PythonBugDay 

The goal of the bug day is to process bug reports in the Python bug tracker, trying to fix and close issues. 

 What to do:

• Grab a copy of the Python codebase from Mercurial, following instructions in the Developer's Guide, and compile it.
• If you have a problem that isn't in the bug tracker, announce it to the IRC channel, and if it's more than five minutes' work, create a bug report for it. See the bug reporting instructions to learn how to write bug reports.
• When you choose a bug to work on, announce it to the IRC channel (e.g. "I'm working on #123456.") or on the bug report itself. This avoids accidentally duplicating work.
• Consider providing a patch that fixes the problem, or at least a simple test case that demonstrates the bug. Please see the patch submission guidelines in the Developer's Guide before submitting a patch.
• Does the bug appear to be gone in the Python development version (the Mercurial branch "default", that will become 3.4), but not the 3.2, 3.3 or 2.7 maintenance branchs? Report that, too.
• If someone else has supplied a fix, see if this fix works for² you, and add your results to the bug.
• Read the text of proposed patches and assess them for correctness and code quality. This is usually the most time-consuming step in the bug fixing process, so reading patches is very useful.
• If there's a working fix, feel free to add a note asking for the fix to get committed. The bug tracker has a lot of items in it, and it's easy for bugs to be overlooked.
• Feature requests should be classified as type 'feature request' in the bug tracker.

If you need any help beforehand, feel free to ask on core-mentorship mailing-list

Updates to docs.python.org

If you haven't already noticed, several months ago we updated the Sphinx theme for documentation of versions Python 3.2 and beyond on docs.python.org. It's a more modern look, and it also serves as an indicator that you're looking at documentation for a newer version. Thanks go out to Georg Brandl for his work on Sphinx, Python's documentation, and this new theme!

PEP 430

Over the weekend, PEP 430 was approved, which changes the default documentation displayed at http://docs.python.org. See the PEP for full details, but the jist is that we're now promoting the current Python 3 release as the default when you go to the docs home page. However, as the majority use case is still for Python 2 documentation, navigating straight to an unversioned page will present you with the current Python 2 documentation. For example, an unversioned link such as http://docs.python.org/library/zipfile will bring up the 2.7.3 documentation.

Version Dropdown

Supporting that change is a new feature that adds a version dropdown to the top of all documentation pages. Not only does this help when users are brought to a page which they don't expect, but switching between versions is a common operation as more and more projects work to add support for Python 3. Issue 8040 is where you'll find discussion on the change and its patches, with the bulk of the work completed by Yury Selivanov with some help from Georg.

This dropdown is especially handy as you peruse the documentation and come to a page that you want to view in another version. Choosing another version while on any page will load that page's other version, where the latest release of that version is chosen, e.g., 2.7 currently points to 2.7.3. So, as you browse the 2.7.3 built-ins page, choosing 3.3 in the dropdown will bring you to the 3.3.0 built-ins page.

We hope these changes enhance your experience when browsing the Python documentation!