[Python-Dev] DRAFT: python-dev Summary for 2006-01-16 through 2005-01-31 (original) (raw)

Tony Meyer tony.meyer at gmail.com
Thu Mar 2 06🔞51 CET 2006

Here's the draft for the second half of January. First half of February on its way soon. Any suggestions/corrections/additions/comments welcome. Thanks! -TAM

============= Announcements

Google summer internships

Google is looking to fill an unprecedented number of student intern positions_ this (US) summer, at several US locations (Mountain View, Santa Monica, Kirkland (Wash.), and New York). The perks are incredible, and Google is not just looking for software development interns - there are also product management positions, and UI design and usability analyst positions.

Contributing thread:

.. _student intern positions: http://www.google.com/jobs/intern.html

[TAM]

Possible Summer of PyPy

Armin Rigo announced the possibility of a "Summer of PyPy", which would follow the style of Google's "Summer of Code" in funding students to work on various aspects of PyPy. The possibility has not been confirmed yet, but we'll let you know when there's more info.

Contributing thread:

[SJB]

========= Summaries

Integers and strings in different bases

Alex Martelli requested the inverse of int(<string>, <base>) that would convert an int into a string with digits in the appropriate base. There was a lot of discussion of exactly where such functionality should go. Among the suggested locations were:

People seemed generally to like the builtin function or math module function options, though there was some debate as to the best name for the function. Guido suggested letting the proposal sit for a week or two to see if anyone could come up with a better name or suggest a better location for the function. (However, he seemed generally in favor of the proposal, suggesting that hex() and oct() should be deprecated and removed in a future version of Python.) No decisions had been made at the time this summary was written.

Contributing threads:

[SJB]

PEP 355: Path - Object oriented filesystem paths

Björn Lindqvist resuscitated the idea of incorporating a Path class based on Jason Ordenorff's path module to the standard library by creating PEP 355_. There was some general discussion (and corresponding PEP changes), with much discussion centred on the use of "/" as a join-with-separator operator, which was eventually dropped from the PEP.

More discussion considered whether Path should subclass string or not. Subclassing string provides the advantage that Paths can be used in the majority of places where strings are currently used, without modification. However, there are many methods of strings that do not seem appropriate for Path objects. Jason Orendorff would prefer for Paths to not subclass strings, and a new format specifier (e.g. for PyArg_ParseTuple()) be created for use with Paths.

There was general agreement that the utility of the module would be highest when Path objects could be seamlessly used where string paths were previous used. The debate centred on whether subclassing string was the best way to do this or not. Path objects clearly are not string objects (e.g. iter and join() are nonsensical with paths). Changing the C API so that Paths are accepted where necessary was the suggested solution, although the PEP (at the time of writing the summary) still subclasses Path from string.

Changing the methods from the names used by the os module and Jason's module to ones that conform to PEP 8 was recommended. Jason explained that the reason that there is so much cruft in his path module is that the design is heavily skewed toward people already familiar with the existing standard library equivalents. He feels that a standard library Path class should have different design goals: less redundancy, fewer methods, and PEP 8 compliant names.

.. _PEP 355: http://www.python.org/peps/pep-0355.html

Contributing threads:

[TAM]

Including ctypes in the stdlib

The inclusion of ctypes in the standard library hit a snag: although Guido pronounced that including it (with a strongly worded wording in the documentation) was fine, ctypes includes libffi, which is built with GPL'd tools, which is causes licensing issues. A lot of the typical legal-advice-from-everyone-but-lawyers discussion took place, but essentially what is required is a way to calculate the information necessary to build libffi without the GPL'd tools. Hye-Shik Chang did some work on this, and is working on integrating this into the ctypes repository, so ctypes may still may it into the standard library.

Contributing threads:

[TAM]

Improving the documentation process

Georg Brandl pointed out the new documentation effort_ by Fredrik Lundh which uses a mix of HTML and PythonDoc-style markup and allows convenient single-method links like http://effbot.org/lib/os.path.join. Georg Brandl played around a bit with the CSS styling, however the main focus of Fredrik's effort was to lower the threshold for user contributions. Along these lines, he was working on an alternate content management system for editing the Python documentation. He currently has a prototype available that mirrors some of the content on python.org, though whether or not this backend will be incorporated into python.org is as yet undecided.

.. _documentation effort: http://www.effbot.org/lib/ .. _CSS styling: http://home.in.tum.de/~brandlg/zipfile.html .. _prototype: http://pydotorg.dyndns.org:8000/

Contributing threads:

[SJB]

Updating ConfigParser

The discussion about possible ConfigParser improvements continued, with the typical failure to make any decisions.

As always, the options include small modifications to the existing ConfigParser (e.g. allowing preservation of comments, order, and whitespace), re-writing ConfigParser (perhaps based on existing third-party versions), or providing a more sophisticated configuration file module (either leaving ConfigParser as-is, or rewriting it to use the new module).

Contributing threads:

[TAM]

Introducing a basenumber abstract class

Alex Martelli proposed introducing a class, basenumber, along the lines of the basestring class. The intention was to make it easier to check whether or not something is a number. However, if inheriting from basenumber was required for all new number-like objects, then the duck-typing approach of simply implementing the appropriate interface would no longer work. Also, since inheriting from multiple builtin types is disallowed, a str subclass that needs to act like a number (e.g. a symbolic type) would no longer be able to do so since it could not also inherit from basenumber.

Guido suggested an index method that would identify a type as convertible into an integer, though without the loss of precision allowed by int. More on this suggestion in the next summary.

Contributing threads:

[SJB]

New Python website: beta.python.org

Skip Montanaro pointed out that Tim Parkin is heading up a new effort_ to redesign the python.org site. The system is based on content formatted primarily in ReST_ for easy editing, though to fully render the pages a number of other tools are required. Tim hopes to get these all wrapped up in setuptools_ and eggs_ so that anyone can also see the fully rendered pages.

Also on the topic of webpage redesign, Steve Holden looked into changing the sourceforge "Download Python" link to point to the right place: http://www.python.org/download/. This link, however, cannot be directly modified, so Martin v. Löwis put a small warning above it.

.. _new effort: http://beta.python.org/ .. _ReST: http://docutils.sourceforge.net/rst.html .. _setuptools: http://peak.telecommunity.com/DevCenter/setuptools .. _eggs: http://peak.telecommunity.com/DevCenter/PythonEggs

Contributing threads:

[SJB]

Readline on OS X 10.4

Thomas Heller has a problem building readline on OS X 10.4. This is a known issue, the result of Apple shipping libedit symlinked to readline rather than readline itself. You need to get a third party copy of readline - Bob Ippolito made a readline egg`. Alternatively, if LDFLAGS AND CPPFLAGS are set appropriately for /opt/local/lib and opt/local/include, and the DarwinPorts copy of readline is installed, then it will be found by setup.py.

Concerns about linking with readline (which is released under the GPL) were raised, that explicitly requiring or checking for readline could violate the licence. A suggestion was made that Python 3000 could stop using readline and use an alternative instead.

.. _readline egg: http://python.org/pypi/readline

Contributing thread:

[TAM]

Yielding from a sub-generator

Before PEP 342, there wasn't a big need for a shortcut to pass control to a "sub-generator" because the following for-loop works well enough:

def main_generator(): ... for value in sub_generator(): yield value

but now that yield can return a value, that value might have to be passed into sub_generator(), not to mention exceptions. Guido felt that a syntactic solution is needed, if the problem is important enough to be solved; a suggestion was "yield from sub_generator()".

Contributing thread:

[TAM]

Using the Win32 API for stat/fstat/wstat

Martin v. Löwis wanted to switch the code for stat/fstat/wstat from using msvcrt to the Win32 API. However, currently, when WindowsError is raised, the errno attribute must be interpreted as a Win32 error instead of as an errno.h error as in its superclass, OSError. The Win32 API provides different error codes, so using these for the errno attribute could cause some code breakage. The options seemed to be either to break WindowsError and use the new Win32 API error codes, or to introduce a new windows_error attribute to hold the additional information. No decision had been made at the time this summary was written.

Contributing thread:

[SJB]

Making timeit easier to use

Connelly Barnes was concerned that the default behavior of the timeit module was not very useful. Since timing a function seems like the most common use of timeit, it should be a simple operation, not a method call with a string describing how to import the function and then another string describing how to call it. Also, the default behavior of 1 million iterations is not useful for any code that cannot be repeated that many times. Instead, the number of iterations should be calibrated as it is in the command-line version. Nick Coghlan provided an implementation for these improvements, but it was unclear whether or not those changes would be applied to the module.

Contributing thread:

[SJB]

Removing deprecated modules

The regex, regsub and timing modules have been obsolete since Python 2.0, but are still importable in Python 2.4 (regex and regsub both generate a deprecation warning). Skip Montanaro asked when these would be removed, and Guido said that they should be as soon as possible.

Contributing thread:

[TAM]

================ Deferred Threads

================== Previous Summaries

=============== Skipped Threads

More information about the Python-Dev mailing list