Finding information for contributing/hacking is unintuitive

Documentation
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I find it unintuitive that the Developer’s Guide is

  • called that
  • linked from the Documentation menu item only

This is because

  • Python is a programming language, so its users are developers
  • I would expect that Community/Get Involved would also have a link to it

I spent far too long looking for hacking/contributing docs.

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You make some good points. “Developer’s Guide” is ambiguous for a programming language. Would “Contributor’s Guide” be better? The first sentence of the guide is “This guide is a comprehensive resource for contributing to Python,” so perhaps.

But: we are looking at splitting the documentation contribution sections out of the Developer’s Guide, so that doc contributors don’t have to wade through core-dev esoterica. So we might need a more specific title.

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Changing “Developer’s guide” to “Contributors’ guide” and then having subsections for “Contributing to code” and “Contributing to docs” seems reasonable.

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Is there a reason not to link the developer’s guide from 👋 Hey Community Members! | Python Software Foundation?

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Great question! I don’t think there was a specific reason not to include “contribute to CPython” in the python.org website, perhaps more of they just didn’t think of including it there at that time.

The pages and content on python.org are maintained by PSF staff, different group of people from Python contributors/core developers, and there is also a different issue tracker for the website vs for CPython itself. So perhaps at the time of writing that page, they were focused on ways to contribute to the PSF/Python community in general.

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On CPython’s Readme file, the devguide is linked under the “Contributing Guide” heading:

I agree that on python.org website menu, it could be clearer if it was called “Contributing Guide” instead of “Developer Guide”.

Perhaps long term solution is to actually rename the DevGuide to Contributing Guide. It seems like “Contributing Guide” is a well-known terminology nowadays to the general open source contributors.

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