Python-announce-list September 2000

python-announce-list@python.org

22 participants
30 discussions

Dr. Dobb's Python-URL! - weekly Python news and links (Sep 12)
by Grant Edwards 12 Sep '00

12 Sep '00

Guido van Rossum invites comments on Python 2.0 license mailing list. http://deja.com/=dnc/getdoc.xp?AN=663641053 Riaan Booysen announces Boa Constructor 0.0.4 - GUI building IDE for wxPython http://deja.com/=dnc/getdoc.xp?AN=666077214 Guido van Rossum announces final release of Python 1.6. http://deja.com/=dnc/getdoc.xp?AN=666084704 Oleg Broytmann's utilities and plugins for manipulating Netscape's bookmarks.html file. http://deja.com/=dnc/getdoc.xp?AN=666340844 Sindh announces formation of WxPython Forum. http://deja.com/=dnc/getdoc.xp?AN=666732731 Oleg Broytmann on extracting MIME attachments from e-mail. http://deja.com/=dnc/getdoc.xp?AN=666771328 Neil Hodgson posts a few hints on using Unicode. http://deja.com/=dnc/getdoc.xp?AN=666779677 Alex Martelli with more comments on Unicode. http://deja.com/=dnc/getdoc.xp?AN=666793245 Ian Maurer on using stored procedures via ADO. http://deja.com/=dnc/getdoc.xp?AN=666992606 Bryn Keller nicely illustrates lazy evaluation http://deja.com/[ST_rn=ps]/getdoc.xp?AN=667667343 and Tim Peters contributes several pertinent pointers http://deja.com/[ST_rn=ps]/getdoc.xp?AN=667704558 Alex Martelli collects references to lint-like heuristic syntax automations http://deja.com/[ST_rn=ps]/getdoc.xp?AN=668254351 ======================================================================== Everything you want is probably one or two clicks away in these pages: Python.org's Python Language Website is the center of Pythonia http://www.python.org PythonWare complements this digest with the daily python url http://www.pythonware.com/daily Much of Python's real work takes place on Special-Interest Group mailing lists http://www.python.org/sigs/ Python Consortium emerges as an independent nexus of activity http://www.python.org/consortium The Vaults of Parnassus ambitiously collects Python resources http://www.vex.net/~x/parnassus/ Cetus does much of the same http://www.cetus-links.de/oo_python.html Python FAQTS http://python.faqts.com/ Python To-Do List anticipates some of Python's future direction http://www.python.org/cgi-bin/todo.py Python Journal is at work on its second issue http://www.pythonjournal.com Links2Go is a new semi-automated link collection; it's impressive what AI can generate http://www.links2go.com/search?search=python comp.lang.python.announce announces new Python software http://deja.com/group/comp.lang.python.announce Archive probing trick of the trade: http://www.dejanews.com/dnquery.xp?QRY=&DBS=2&ST=PS&defaultOp=AND&LNG=ALL&f… Previous - (U)se the (R)esource, (L)uke! - messages are listed here: http://purl.org/thecliff/python/url.html or http://www.dejanews.com/dnquery.xp?QRY=~g%20comp.lang.python%20Python-URL%21 Suggestions/corrections for next week's posting are always welcome. [http://www.egroups.com/list/python-url-leads/ is hibernating. Just e-mail us ideas directly.] To receive a new issue of this posting in e-mail each Monday morning, ask <claird(a)neosoft.com> to subscribe. Mention "Python-URL!". -- The Python-URL! Team-- Dr. Dobb's Journal (http://www.ddj.com) is pleased to participate in and sponsor the "Python-URL!" project. -- Cameron Laird <claird(a)NeoSoft.com> Business: http://www.Phaseit.net Personal: http://starbase.neosoft.com/~claird/home.html

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MacPython 2.0b1 released
by Jack Jansen 12 Sep '00

12 Sep '00

MacPython 2.0beta1 has been released. You can download it through the MacPython homepage, http://www.cwi.nl/~jack/macpython.html . Aside from all the goodies that are not mac-specific there's quite a bit of new mac-only stuff too. Here's the release notes: Changes in 2.0b1 since 1.5.2 ---------------------------- These release notes refer to Mac-specific changes only. See NEWS (in the Misc folder) for machine-independent changes. Unfortunately I have messed my administration up, so I can't give complete Mac-specific release notes for the changes in this release. So, I will have to leave it at the highlights: - 68K support has been dropped, this release is PPC only. - Threads support (through standard Python threads module). - Tkinter works again! At least: it doesn't immedeately crash in obvious ways. - Appearance support through App module and added calls in many other modules. Most dialogs and applets have also been converted to Appearance. There's also a ControlAccessor module that handles [GS]etControlData with their plethora of argument types. - Navigation Services support, with macfs StandardFile calls transparently replaced by their NavServices counterparts. - Offscreen QuickDraw and GWorld support through Qdoffs module. - Drag manager support (Drag module). - Much better CGI support and examples, see :Mac:Tools:CGI. - Better OSA/AppleEvent support. - Up/downcasting of handle-based types is now unified and implemented in the inherting module, e.g. handleobj = ctlobj.as_Resource() ctlobj = Ctl.as_Control(handle) - Added macos.FreeMem(), MaxBlock() and CompactMem(), mainly so apps in Python can give low-memory warnings. - MediaDescr module parses some QuickTime media descriptions (but definitely not all). What is not in this distribution -------------------------------- - The garbage collection mods to 2.0 have not been enabled, mainly due to lack of test-time. - Stackless Python/microthreads are not in here. Ask on the pythonmac-SIG if you want them. - Carbon support is not in here, but should be happening as soon as GUSI is ready. - Distutils is not in here, again due to lack of time. Known problems -------------- This list is far from complete, more problems may be listed on the MacPython homepage, http://www.cwi.nl/~jack/macpython.html. - The IDE and Tkinter do not work together. Run tkinter programs under PythonInterpreter. - Aliases do not work in sys.path entries. -- Jack Jansen | ++++ stop the execution of Mumia Abu-Jamal ++++ Jack.Jansen(a)oratrix.com | ++++ if you agree copy these lines to your sig ++++ www.oratrix.nl/~jack | ++++ see http://www.xs4all.nl/~tank/ ++++

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ANN: HappyDoc 0.7.1
by Doug Hellmann 10 Sep '00

10 Sep '00

Announcing HappyDoc, a Python documentation extraction tool. HappyDoc is a tool for extracting documentation from Python source code. It differs from other such applications by the fact that it uses the parse tree for a module to derive the information used in its output, rather that importing the module directly. This allows the user to generate documentation for modules which need special context to be imported. Version 0.7.1 Version 0.7.1 contains several fixes for reported bugs. Special thanks to Jesper Hertel and many others for reporting them so quickly and clearly. With this update, I have also updated the Zope source documentation files on Zope.org at http://www.zope.org/Members/hellmann/ZopeSrcDocs. Download Download the latest version of HappyDoc from the home page on SourceForge: http://sourceforge.net/projects/happydoc Doc-string Format How does an author write documentation so that it will be marked up and look fancy? This is a perennial question for Python, and seems to have introduced a roadblock into the development of more robust and useful documentation tools. By separating the formatter classes from the docset classes, HappyDoc allows a user to create their own formatter to interpret comments in any way they see fit. The default for the HTMLTableFormatter (the default formatter for HappyDoc) is to treat __doc__ strings as StructuredText. Don't like StructuredText? Write your own formatter that does something different and drop it into place. Documentation not in Doc-strings It is not always desirable to put all documentation in __doc__ strings. Sometime, notably when working with Zope, special meaning is attached to the presence of __doc__ strings. For this reason, and to support existing code which might not have __doc__ strings, HappyDoc will find and extract documentation in Python comments. Comment documentation can contain all of the same formatting as __doc__ strings. The preceding comment marker will be stripped off and the lines will be assembled and treated as a block of StructuredText. To use this feature, it is important to place the comments **before** the named object which they describe. In this example: # # Class documentation goes here # class ClassWithNoDocStrings: "Using __doc__ strings overrides comment documentation." def method1(self, params): "This method uses a __doc__ string." pass # # Method2 does not use a __doc__ string. # def method2(self): pass The output would include the __doc__ strings for the class and for method1. It would also make it appear that method2 had a __doc__ string with the contents "Method2 does not use a __doc__ string."

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ANN: ScanErrLog 1.4
by Jerome Alet 08 Sep '00

08 Sep '00

I'm very pleased to announce ScanErrLog 1.4 ScanErrLog is a python module which extracts error messages from Apache error_log files and present them in decreasing order of number of occurences, with lots of options. This is especially useful if you're interested in knowing the error messages which annoy the most your website's visitors. You can use it either as a standalone program or import it into another python program, or use it as a CGI script. You can produce reports in HTML, XML, PDF or plain TEXT format You can: - view sample reports - test it online with real data - download it from: http://cortex.unice.fr/~jerome/scanerrlog/ The 1.4 release includes important bug fixes. Any feedback is very welcome. PS: PDF support needs you to install the Excellent ReportLab (http://www.reportlab.com) -- Jerome ALET - alet(a)unice.fr - http://cortex.unice.fr/~jerome

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Python 2.0b1 is released!
by Guido van Rossum 08 Sep '00

08 Sep '00

[Resending to debug the moderation setup] A unique event in all the history of Python: two releases on the same day! (At least in my timezone. :-) Python 2.0b1 is released. The BeOpen PythonLabs and our cast of SourceForge volunteers have been working on this version on which since May. Please go here to pick it up: http://www.pythonlabs.com/tech/python2.0/ There's a tarball and a Windows installer, online documentation (with a new color scheme :-), RPMs, and a long list of new features. OK, a teaser: - Augmented assignment, e.g. x += 1 - List comprehensions, e.g. [x**2 for x in range(10)] - Extended import statement, e.g. import Module as Name - Extended print statement, e.g. print >> file, "Hello" - Optional collection of cyclical garbage There's one bit of sad news: according to Richard Stallman, this version is no more compatible with the GPL than version 1.6 that was released this morning by CNRI, because of a technicality concerning the choice of law provision in the CNRI license. Because 2.0b1 has to be considered a derivative work of 1.6, this technicality in the CNRI license applies to 2.0 too (and to any other derivative works of 1.6). CNRI is still trying to work this out with Stallman, so I hope that we will be able to release future versions of Python under a GPL-compatible license. There's Only One Way To Do It. --Guido van Rossum (home page: http://www.pythonlabs.com/~guido/)

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[Announce] Linux Wing IDE for Python beta release
by John Ehresman 08 Sep '00

08 Sep '00

I'm happy to announce beta release of Wing IDE, a commercial integrated development environment for Python. The beta release runs on Linux and requires a Python 1.5.2 interpreter; A Windows 9*/NT/2K version and support for the 2.0 interpreter will be available subsequently. Wing IDE may be obtained, along with a free 30-day evaluation license, from www.wingide.com. Features include: * Graphical debugger with the ability to debug remote processes, such as web CGIs. The core of the debugger is implemented in C, making it much faster than the standard pdb module. * Powerful source code editor, including syntax highlighting, auto-completion, auto-indentation, source structure menu, multi-part key bindings, keyboard/command macros, and an emacs personality. * Module- and class-oriented code browsing based on continually updated analysis of source code. A single user license for Wing IDE costs $99 US. At our discretion, we offer discounts for students, volume purchases, and non-commercial open source developers. We hope you'll take a test flight today, and look forward to your feedback on how Wing IDE can be improved! Thanks, John Ehresman ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Archaeopteryx Software, Inc. Wing IDE for Python www.archaeopteryx.com Take Flight!

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September 6th Zope Weekly News
by ethan mindlace fremen 07 Sep '00

07 Sep '00

Merely 4 hours past the deadline, the Zope Weekly News lands with a heaping helping of goodies: Rapid Zope Book evolution, lots of fish in the bowl, Zope skin, PTK proliferation, and Zope.org replication. The opinions expressed in Zope Weekly news are solely the authors', and not the opinions of Digital Creations, The Zope Community at-large, or the Spanish Inquisition. You can always get to the most recent Zope Weekly News with "one convenient URL", http://www.zope.org/Documentation/ZWN/current And Now For Something Completely Different: --- Documentation -- by Michel Pelletier This week (a shorty due to Labor day) Amos and I are polishing up spelling, added image and figure semantics to structured text (and extended the HTML and SGML generators to spit them out, yum!). Normalized all the font and style conventions, and started on chapter 1 screenshots. Yeah! I fleshed out a lot of Chapter 9 (Cataloging) also. As always, you can "see the latest and greatest version", http://www.zope.org/Members/michel/ZB/ --- Zope Status -- by Brian Lloyd Summary Zope 2.2.1 release, progress on dev.zope.org projects Recent highlights ZWN has been spotty lately so to recap, Zope 2.2.1 was released August 25th. Lots and lots of bugs were fixed for 2.2.1, and it seems to have covered the issues that were keeping people from moving to 2.2. There have been two reported problems with custom ZClasses after updating to 2.2.1, but we have not been able to reproduce them and they do not seem to be a general problem. There has been a fair amount of activity on dev.zope.org, with a number of new proposals for things such as session tracking and a unit testing support framework. Chris McDonough gets the prolific-proposal-writer-of-the-week award :) The new security assertion proposal has been made into an active project, and the first draft of the first deliverable (the Zope developer's guide to product security) is "available for review and feedback", http://dev.zope.org/Wikis/DevSite/Projects/DeclarativeSecurity/ZopeSecurity… There are also a number of proposal where discussion seems to have petered out - we'll need to start looking at these over time and decide how to either get champions to refine them and move them forward or put them in some sort of proposal archive. In other news, FourThought continues to work on the new XMLDocument and will shortly be starting on the XSL Templates project. This week This week we will be starting to firm up a todo list for the next Zope feature release and trying to get the declarative security "user manual" finalized - after that we'll begin implementing the new assertion style for the next feature release. --- Zope Studio -- by Martijn Pieters Zope Studio Due to other project work, no news this week Skinnable And Localizable Objects After two weeks of holidaying in Scotland, I am back at the keys. Week of 13-08 - Architecture finalised. - Implemented all core objects and code. - Made practically all of Zope Skinnable This Week - Add some code to make skinned files in Zope Core more backward compatible. - Clean up last few objects with recalcitrant, inline DTML, and make then Skinnable. - Split out all strings to make Zope fully translatable. --- State of the PTK, 2000/09/04 In the weeks since our last report, the PTK community has been quite busy: * Shane Hathaway landed the proposed "next-generation architecture", http://www.zope.org/Products/PTK/ZWiki/NewPTKArchitecture, refactoring the "toolkit" as a set of "portal tools", each providing services to other objects in the portal. The tools include: 'portal_membership' -- tracks personalization and owned content, tying them (much more loosely) to the AUTHENTICATED_USER. 'portal_registration' -- implements portal-specific policies for user signup, password generation/mailng, etc. 'portal_workflow' -- encapsulates the workflow policies of the portal 'portal_catalog' -- indexes portal content 'portal_discussions' -- implements portal policies for types of content which are "discussable", and how they are linked to their discussion threads. 'portal_actions' -- list context-specific actions for portal objects. 'portal_undo' -- provide a portal-friendly interface to Zope's undo machinery. Each of these tools is represented as an interface in the 'PTKBase' product, with a sample implementation (typically preserving the "old" policies/semantics) in the 'PTKDemo' or 'DemoPortal' products. The single most attractive feature of the design is that portal managers can replace these tools on a *per-portal basis*. * Fabio Forno provided invaluable aid in debugging the new tools. * One noticeable result of the new architecture is the "renaming of the toolbox", http://lists.zope.org/pipermail/zope-ptk/2000-August/001341.html to the "actions list", in order to avoid confusion with the "portal tools." * Bill Anderson "released a new version", http://www.zope.org/Members/Bill/News/MembershipRelease-075 of the Membership product, upgrading it to "beta" status. This product uses ZPatterns to manage member registration and logins, and is on a trajectory for eventual reintegration with the new PTK Architecture. * Chris Withers announced "Swishdot", http://www.squishdot.org/968089230/index_html, a successor to the popular Squishdot weblog product, to be built around the PTK. * Tres Seaver "proposed", http://lists.zope.org/pipermail/zope-ptk/2000-August/001430.html revamping the implementation of the Dublin Core metadata within the PTK, in order to bring it closer into line with the intent of the "spec":http://purl.org/DC. * A "long thread", http://lists.zope.org/pipermail/zope-ptk/2000-August/001461.html on "hooking" various portal actions resulted in a "proposal", http://lists.zope.org/pipermail/zope-ptk/2000-August/001493.html to create an "event channel" object, 'portal_events', as another tool. PTK Tracker Vitals, 2000/09/04 (since 2000/07/25) Here is is the current state of the tracker:: Type / Status New Closed Current Bug Reports 5 3 26 Feature/Doc Requests 0 0 14 --- Zope Web -- by Ethan Fremen ZEO Bakes in Zope.org Oven ZEO is being cooked with Zope.org. This has unfortunately endengered some downtime, as ZEO bugs step out from hiding. The bonus is that Zope.org should be much more stable when this is done, and ZEO users get the benifit of a ZEO that's been put through it's paces. The Caching Machine Zope.org now has its images and files cached by Apache and any downstream cache that cares to do so. This should result in a much faster apparent speed for Zope.org, though we can expect that raw hit-count (as measured by Apache) may decline. Stay tuned for the How-To. Go Forth and Multiply Zope.org is going to be getting a new ZEO client on a geographically remote machine. Once this is tested and solid, Zope.org mirroring will expand to several clients in strategic spots throughout the globe. Watch this space for more details. Distributed Decision Making As a necessary precursor stage for a more active involvement of the community, messages to webmaster(a)zope.org and issues posted in the "zope.org Tracker", http://www.zope.org/Tracker will be sent to the zope web mailing list. Hope to see you there! -EOT-

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Dr. Dobb's Python-URL! - weekly Python news and links (Sep 5)
by Grant Edwards 06 Sep '00

06 Sep '00

Guido van Rossum posts a link to the 2.0 license. http://deja.com/=dnc/getdoc.xp?AN=663641053 John Aycock turns over decompyle to Artmut Göbel. http://deja.com/=dnc/getdoc.xp?AN=663757100 Michael Haggerty announces version 0.6 of PyWX: a Python module for AOLserver. http://deja.com/=dnc/getdoc.xp?AN=664200397 Alex Martelli explains the Pythonic way to know you've reached EOF. http://deja.com/=dnc/getdoc.xp?AN=664673282 Travis Oliphant announces version 0.3 of optimize.py: a module that impliments various optimization algorithms. http://deja.com/=dnc/getdoc.xp?AN=664872326 ======================================================================== Everything you want is probably one or two clicks away in these pages: Python.org's Python Language Website is the center of Pythonia http://www.python.org PythonWare complements this digest with the daily python url http://www.pythonware.com/daily Much of Python's real work takes place on Special-Interest Group mailing lists http://www.python.org/sigs/ Python Consortium emerges as an independent nexus of activity http://www.python.org/consortium The Vaults of Parnassus ambitiously collects Python resources http://www.vex.net/~x/parnassus/ Cetus does much of the same http://www.cetus-links.de/oo_python.html Python FAQTS http://python.faqts.com/ Python To-Do List anticipates some of Python's future direction http://www.python.org/cgi-bin/todo.py Python Journal is at work on its second issue http://www.pythonjournal.com Links2Go is a new semi-automated link collection; it's impressive what AI can generate http://www.links2go.com/search?search=python comp.lang.python.announce announces new Python software http://deja.com/group/comp.lang.python.announce Archive probing trick of the trade: http://www.dejanews.com/dnquery.xp?QRY=&DBS=2&ST=PS&defaultOp=AND&LNG=ALL&f… Previous - (U)se the (R)esource, (L)uke! - messages are listed here: http://purl.org/thecliff/python/url.html or http://www.dejanews.com/dnquery.xp?QRY=~g%20comp.lang.python%20Python-URL%21 Suggestions/corrections for next week's posting are always welcome. [http://www.egroups.com/list/python-url-leads/ is hibernating. Just e-mail us ideas directly.] To receive a new issue of this posting in e-mail each Monday morning, ask <claird(a)neosoft.com> to subscribe. Mention "Python-URL!". -- The Python-URL! Team-- Dr. Dobb's Journal (http://www.ddj.com) is pleased to participate in and sponsor the "Python-URL!" project. -- Cameron Laird <claird(a)NeoSoft.com> Business: http://www.Phaseit.net Personal: http://starbase.neosoft.com/~claird/home.html

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ANN: HappyDoc 0.6
by Doug Hellmann 04 Sep '00

04 Sep '00

Announcing HappyDoc, a Python documentation extraction tool. HappyDoc is a tool for extracting documentation from Python source code. It differs from other such applications by the fact that it uses the parse tree for a module to derive the information used in its output, rather that importing the module directly. This allows the user to generate documentation for modules which need special context to be imported. Version 0.6 Version 0.6 is the first public release. It is described completely on the home page (see just below). It isn't ready for a 1.0 release number yet because I want to add a few more core features before getting to that point. It is stable, however, and is somewhere between a beta and full-release level. Download Download the latest version of HappyDoc from the home page on SourceForge: http://sourceforge.net/projects/happydoc Doc-string Format How does an author write documentation so that it will be marked up and look fancy? This is a perennial question for Python, and seems to have introduced a roadblock into the development of more robust and useful documentation tools. By separating the formatter classes from the docset classes, HappyDoc allows a user to create their own formatter to interpret comments in any way they see fit. The default for the HTMLTableFormatter (the default formatter for HappyDoc) is to treat __doc__ strings as StructuredText. Don't like StructuredText? Write your own formatter that does something different and drop it into place. Documentation not in Doc-strings It is not always desirable to put all documentation in __doc__ strings. Sometime, notably when working with Zope, special meaning is attached to the presence of __doc__ strings. For this reason, and to support existing code which might not have __doc__ strings, HappyDoc will find and extract documentation in Python comments. Comment documentation can contain all of the same formatting as __doc__ strings. The preceding comment marker will be stripped off and the lines will be assembled and treated as a block of StructuredText. To use this feature, it is important to place the comments **before** the named object which they describe. In this example: # # Class documentation goes here # class ClassWithNoDocStrings: "Using __doc__ strings overrides comment documentation." def method1(self, params): "This method uses a __doc__ string." pass # # Method2 does not use a __doc__ string. # def method2(self): pass The output would include the __doc__ strings for the class and for method1. It would also make it appear that method2 had a __doc__ string with the contents "Method2 does not use a __doc__ string." Feedback on HappyDoc is welcome to doughellmann(a)bigfoot.com. Doug Hellmann

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Experimental ZODB packages
by A.M. Kuchling 01 Sep '00

01 Sep '00

I've packaged the ZODB using the Distutils. There are 3 packages, containing the ZODB itself, ExtensionClass, and a few miscellaneous Python modules that are required. Installation instructions are at http://starship.python.net/crew/amk/zodb/install.html The packages themselves are available through FTP from: ftp://starship.python.net/pub/crew/amk/zodb/ This repackaging is aimed at people who want to use the ZODB in their own programs without using other Zope features; it will save the effort of figuring out which bits of Zope need to get installed. The packaging is still experimental, so please inform me if you run into problems during the installation process. Future plans are to merge the 3 packages into a single package, and also package ZEO. --amk

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Python-announce-list September 2000