[Python-Dev] Python 3.0.1 (original) (raw)

Guido van Rossum guido at python.org
Fri Jan 30 00:40:41 CET 2009

On Thu, Jan 29, 2009 at 3:27 PM, Raymond Hettinger <python at rcn.com> wrote:

To get the ball rolling, I have a candidate for discussion.

Very late in the 3.0 process (after feature freeze), the bsddb code was ripped out (good riddance). This had the unfortunate side-effect of crippling shelves which now fall back to using dumbdbm. I'm somewhat working on an alternate dbm based on sqlite3: http://code.activestate.com/recipes/576638/ It is a pure python module and probably will not be used directly, but shelves will see an immediate benefit (especially for large shelves) in terms of speed and space. On the one hand, it is an API change or new feature because people can (if they choose) access the dbm directly. OTOH, it is basically a performance fix for shelves whose API won't change at all. The part that is visible and incompatible is that 3.0.1 shelves won't be readable by 3.0.0.

That is too much for 3.0.1. It could affect external file formats which strikes me as a bad idea.

Sounds like a good candidate for 3.1, which we should be expecting in 4-6 months I hope. Also you could try find shelve users (are there any?) and recommend they install this as a 3rd party package, with the expectation it'll be built into 3.1.

-- --Guido van Rossum (home page: http://www.python.org/~guido/)

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