[Python-Dev] Volunteer help with porting (original) (raw)

R. David Murray rdmurray at bitdance.com
Tue Sep 7 17:37:06 CEST 2010

On Tue, 07 Sep 2010 18:34:49 +0400, Oleg Broytman <phd at phd.pp.ru> wrote:

On Tue, Sep 07, 2010 at 02:02:59PM -0000, exarkun at twistedmatrix.com wrote: > On 01:33 pm, phd at phd.pp.ru wrote: >> As there is already Python 3.2 alpha, the core of Python has already >> been ported > > How about the email package?

What about email? It is a core library, right? It has been ported AFAIK. Or have I missed something?

Some bug reports, perhaps?

Email has been "ported" in the sense that all the existing tests pass under py3k. It is not, however, fully functional: it cannot handle input that contains binary data with the high bit set. (To put it another way, the python3 email package currently handles only 7bit clean data.) This has various unfortunate consequences for other standard library packages (cgi, nntp, etc) that depend directly or indirectly on the email package.

To fix this the email package API and a chunk of the internals needs to be redesigned so that it can handle bytes while still providing a string-based interface to the textual data. This is no small task, since email in python2 has been getting away with all kinds of dirty tricks because of the lack of a clean bytes/string separation in python2.

See http://launchpad.net/python-email6 for current status of the project.

Prashant Kumar, if you would like to help with the email6 project, please sign up to the email-sig mailing list and introduce yourself there. All help is welcome! It is not a "porting" project strictly speaking, but it certainly is interesting :)

-- R. David Murray www.bitdance.com

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