[Python-Dev] Rework nntlib? (original) (raw)

Steve Holden steve at holdenweb.com
Wed Sep 15 16:21:11 CEST 2010

On 9/15/2010 10:02 AM, Jesse Noller wrote:

On Tue, Sep 14, 2010 at 7:57 PM, Steve Holden <steve at holdenweb.com> wrote:

On 9/14/2010 6:45 PM, R. David Murray wrote:

On Tue, 14 Sep 2010 16:34:33 +0530, Senthil Kumaran <orsenthil at gmail.com> wrote:

On Tue, Sep 14, 2010 at 12:44:30PM +0200, Baptiste Carvello wrote:

Antoine> Like the email package, nntplib in py3k is broken (because of Antoine> various bytes/str mismatches; I suppose the lack of a test Antoine> suite didn't help when porting).

How heavily used is nntp these days (unless you're looking for spam)? Would it make more sense to find someone willing to maintain it outside the Python core and just remove it altogether? Reading this from GMANE ;-) I guess, Skip's question or intention was, how often nntplib as a module is being used these days to write scripts/tools or clients? Very rarely. It would definitely be interesting to know, if there are python applications out there which are using nntplib at the moment. You all might find it interesting to know that I'm now maintaining email and working on email6 as a direct consequence of nntplib. I was using it to read mailing lists through gmane, and when I tried to port my nntp tool to Python3 I found that decodeheader (among other things) was broken, and as a consequence of talking to Barry about that walked in to the email minefield.... I'm currently not using my nttp reader, but it is because I couldn't stand working on my client in Python2, I wanted to be using Python3. So I volunteered to help with email...but I figure I'll come back around and help Antoine with nttplib by and by :) And again I say, if anyone knows of any budgets to which this work is important, the PSF will be happy to try and tap these people for money that can help the development effort. Frankly I am a little embarrassed by the poor quality of some library code. I think it shows that the "rush to release" which might not have been in Python's best short-term interests, even though actually getting it out the door was a significant occurrence for the long term.. regards Steve Without the release we probably would not have found out about these issues; no one seems to take the betas or alphas for serious test drives (to be expected) with real code, so yeah, in hindsight, there are issues - but then again, they would have been fixed if everyone had really known about them in advance. No one wants to ship something with horrible bugs in it. Well, consider my remarks in a historical rather than a critical context. I have no beef with 3.0 having come out when it did, and see no reason why 3.x shouldn't continue to yield lessons for all Python implementers.

The question of when to declare 3.x the "official" release is interesting. I am inclined to say "when there's at least one other implementation at 3.2" - even if CPython is then at 3.3 or 3.4.

regards Steve

-- Steve Holden +1 571 484 6266 +1 800 494 3119 DjangoCon US September 7-9, 2010 http://djangocon.us/ See Python Video! http://python.mirocommunity.org/ Holden Web LLC http://www.holdenweb.com/

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