Development workflow

Important

This is part of a Draft of the Python Contributor’s Guide. Text in square brackets are notes about content to fill in. Currently, the devguide and this new Contributor’s Guide co-exist in the repo. We are using Sphinx include directives to demonstrate the re-organization. The final Contributor’s Guide will replace the devguide with content in only one place. We welcome help with this!

The [Plan for the Contributor’s Guide] page has more details about the current state of this draft and how you can help. See more info about the Contributor Guide in the discussion forum: Refactoring the DevGuide.

[This is the existing Development workflow page from the devguide]

• Following Python’s development
  • Standards of behaviour in these communication channels
  • Mailing lists
  • Discourse (discuss.python.org web forum)
    • Tutorials for new users
    • Reading topics
    • Notifications
      • Following categories (category notifications)
      • Following individual threads (topic notifications)
      • Customising notifications on user preference
    • Enabling mailing list mode
  • Discord (private chat server)
  • IRC
  • Blogs
  • Setting expectations for open source participation
  • Additional repositories
• Development cycle
  • Branches
    • In-development (main) branch
    • Maintenance branches
    • Security branches
    • End-of-life branches
  • Stages
    • Pre-alpha
    • Alpha
    • Beta
    • Release Candidate (RC)
    • Final
  • Repository administration
    • Organization repository policy
    • Organization owner policy
    • Current owners
    • Repository administrator role policy
    • Current administrators
    • Repository release manager role policy
  • Governance
• Adding to the stdlib
  • Adding to a pre-existing module
  • Adding a new module
    • Acceptable types of modules
    • Requirements
    • Proposal process
  • Adding a new environment variable
• Standard library extension modules
  • Classifying extension modules
  • Adding an extension module to CPython
    • Updating the CPython project tree
    • Configuring the CPython project
      • Updating Modules/Setup.{bootstrap,stdlib}.in
      • Updating configure.ac
      • Updating Makefile.pre.in
      • Updating MSVC project files
    • Compiling the CPython project
    • Troubleshooting
      • No rule to make target regen-configure
      • make regen-configure and missing permissions with Docker
      • Missing Py_BUILD_CORE define when using internal headers
    • Tips
      • Restricting to the Limited API
• Changing Python’s C API
  • The internal API
    • With PyAPI_FUNC or PyAPI_DATA
    • With the extern keyword
    • Private names
    • Internal API tests
  • Public C API
    • Guidelines for expanding/changing the public API
    • C API tests
  • Unstable C API
    • Moving an API from the public tier to Unstable
    • Moving an API from the private tier to unstable
    • Moving an API from unstable to public
  • Limited API
    • Guidelines for changing the Limited API, and removing items from it
    • Guidelines for adding to the Limited API
    • Adding a new definition to the Limited API
    • Limited API tests
• Changing the Python language
  • What qualifies
  • Suggesting new features and language changes
  • PEP process
• Changing CPython’s grammar
• Porting to a new platform
• Software Bill-of-Materials (SBOM)
  • Updating a dependency
  • Adding a new dependency
  • Removing a dependency
• Python Security Response Team (PSRT)
  • Vulnerability report triage
  • Coordinating a vulnerability report
  • Template responses