I’ve decided to step up my involvement in Django development in the run-up to Django 1.2, so I’m currently going through several years worth of accumulated pony requests figuring out which ones are worth advocating for. I’m also ensuring I have the code to back them up—my innocent AutoEscaping proposal a few years ago resulted in an enormous amount of work by Malcolm and I don’t think he’d appreciate a repeat performance.

I’m not a big fan of branches when it comes to exploratory development—they’re fine for doing the final implementation once an approach has been agreed, but I don’t think they are a very effective way of discussing proposals. I’d much rather see working code in a separate application—that way I can try it out with an existing project without needing to switch to a new Django branch. Keeping code out of a branch also means people can start using it for real development work, making the API much eas...