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Python 1.6 can be thought of as the Contractual Obligations Python release. After the core development team left CNRI in May 2000, CNRI requested that a 1.6 release be created, containing all the work on Python that had been performed at CNRI. Python 1.6 therefore represents the state of the CVS tree as of May 2000, with the most significant new feature being Unicode support. Development continued after May, of course, so the 1.6 tree received a few fixes to ensure that it's forward-compatible with Python 2.0. 1.6 is therefore part of Python's evolution, and not a side branch.
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So, should you take much interest in Python 1.6? Probably not. The 1.6final and 2.0beta1 releases were made on the same day (September 5, 2000), the plan being to finalize Python 2.0 within a month or so. If you have applications to maintain, there seems little point in breaking things by moving to 1.6, fixing them, and then having another round of breakage within a month by moving to 2.0; you're better off just going straight to 2.0. Most of the really interesting features described in this document are only in 2.0, because a lot of work was done between May and September.
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The most important of the services now hosted at SourceForge is the Python CVS tree, the version-controlled repository containing the source code for Python. Previously, there were roughly 7 or so people who had write access to the CVS tree, and all patches had to be inspected and checked in by one of the people on this short list. Obviously, this wasn't very scalable. By moving the CVS tree to SourceForge, it became possible to grant write access to more people; as of September 2000 there were 27 people able to check in changes, a fourfold increase. This makes possible large-scale changes that wouldn't be attempted if they'd have to be filtered through the small group of core developers. For example, one day Peter Schneider-Kamp took it into his head to drop K&R C compatibility and convert the C source for Python to ANSI C. After getting approval on the python-dev mailing list, he launched into a flurry of checkins that lasted about a week, other developers joined in to help, and the job was done. If there were only 5 people with write access, probably that task would have been viewed as "nice, but not worth the time and effort needed" and it would never have gotten done.
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The shift to using SourceForge's services has resulted in a remarkable increase in the speed of development. Patches now get submitted, commented on, revised by people other than the original submitter, and bounced back and forth between people until the patch is deemed worth checking in. Bugs are tracked in one central location and can be assigned to a specific person for fixing, and we can count the number of open bugs to measure progress. This didn't come without a cost: developers now have more e-mail to deal with, more mailing lists to follow, and special tools had to be written for the new environment. For example, SourceForge sends default patch and bug notification e-mail messages that are completely unhelpful, so Ka-Ping Yee wrote an HTML screen-scraper that sends more useful messages.
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The ease of adding code caused a few initial growing pains, such as code was checked in before it was ready or without getting clear agreement from the developer group. The approval process that has emerged is somewhat similar to that used by the Apache group. Developers can vote +1, +0, -0, or -1 on a patch; +1 and -1 denote acceptance or rejection, while +0 and -0 mean the developer is mostly indifferent to the change, though with a slight positive or negative slant. The most significant change from the Apache model is that the voting is essentially advisory, letting Guido van Rossum, who has Benevolent Dictator For Life status, know what the general opinion is. He can still ignore the result of a vote, and approve or reject a change even if the community disagrees with him.
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Producing an actual patch is the last step in adding a new feature, and is usually easy compared to the earlier task of coming up with a good design. Discussions of new features can often explode into lengthy mailing list threads, making the discussion hard to follow, and no one can read every posting to python-dev. Therefore, a relatively formal process has been set up to write Python Enhancement Proposals (PEPs), modelled on the Internet RFC process. PEPs are draft documents that describe a proposed new feature, and are continually revised until the community reaches a consensus, either accepting or rejecting the proposal. Quoting from the introduction to PEP 1, "PEP Purpose and Guidelines":
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PEP stands for Python Enhancement Proposal. A PEP is a design document providing information to the Python community, or describing a new feature for Python. The PEP should provide a concise technical specification of the feature and a rationale for the feature.
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