Mailman 3 November 2001 - Python-announce-list

ANNOUNCE: Optik 1.0 (new command-line parsing library)
by Greg Ward 12 Nov '01

12 Nov '01

Optik 1.0 ========= Optik is a powerful, flexible, extensible, easy-to-use command-line parsing library for Python. Using Optik, you can add intelligent, sophisticated handling of command-line options to your scripts with very little overhead. Here's an example of using Optik to add some command-line options to a simple script: from optik import OptionParser [...] parser = OptionParser() parser.add_option("-f", "--file", action="store", type="string", dest="filename", help="write report to FILE", metavar="FILE") parser.add_option("-q", "--quiet", action="store_false", dest="verbose", default=1, help="don't print status messages to stdout") (options, args) = parser.parse_args() With these few lines of code, users of your script can now do the "usual thing" on the command-line: <yourscript> -f outfile --quiet <yourscript> -qfoutfile <yourscript> --file=outfile -q <yourscript> --quiet --file outfile (All of these result in options.filename == "outfile" options.verbose == 0 ...just as you might expect.) Even niftier, users can run one of <yourscript> -h <yourscript> --help and Optik will print out a brief summary of your script's optons: usage: <yourscript> [options] options: -h, --help show this help message and exit -fFILE, --file=FILE write report to FILE -q, --quiet don't print status messages to stdout That's just a taste of the flexibility Optik gives you in parsing your command-line. See the documentation included in the package for details. AUTHOR, COPYRIGHT, AVAILABILITY ------------------------------- Optik was written by Greg Ward <gward(a)python.net> The latest version of Optik can be found at http://optik.sourceforge.net/ Copyright (c) 2001 Gregory P. Ward. All rights reserved. -- Greg Ward - just another Python hacker gward(a)python.net http://starship.python.net/~gward/ "What do you mean -- a European or an African swallow?"

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RELEASE Mailman 2.0.7
by barry＠zope.com 09 Nov '01

09 Nov '01

I've just released version 2.0.7 of Mailman, the GNU Mailing List Manager. Mailman is released under the GNU General Public License (GPL). Version 2.0.7 closes two potential security / denial-of-service problems in the Mailman 2.0.x series, and includes a few other minor bug fixes. - If you are running Python 1.5.2, it is possible for someone to carefully craft some cookie data, and then trick Mailman into accepting that data, that will crash your Python interpreter. If you are not running Python 1.5.2, you should be invulnerable to the crash, however it is still possible for someone to even more carefully craft some cookie data that could cause arbitrary class constructors to be executed on the server. Mailman 2.0.7 closes this hole by disabling the Cookie.py module's default unpickling of cookie data. - It is possible that Mailman's bounce handler could receive a bounce message that looked like a DSN report, but was incorrectly formatted. Under Mailman 2.0.6's bounce detector, you would get a traceback for a message that would never be removed from the queue, thus potentially wedging your qrunner until the offending message was manually deleted. Mailman 2.0.7 fixes the DSN.py bounce detector. There are a few other useful bug fixes in this release, described in the NEWS excerpt below. I recommend anybody running a version of Mailman up to, and including 2.0.6 to upgrade to 2.0.7. GNU Mailman is software to help manage electronic mail discussion lists. Mailman gives each mailing list a unique web page and allows users to subscribe, unsubscribe, and change their account options over the web. Even the list manager can administer his or her list entirely via the web. Mailman has most of the features that people want in a mailing list management system, including built-in archiving, mail-to-news gateways, spam filters, bounce detection, digest delivery, and so on. Mailman is compatible with most web servers, web browsers, and mail servers. It runs on GNU/Linux and should run on any other Unix-like operating system. Mailman 2.0.7 requires Python 1.5.2 or newer. To install Mailman from source, you will need a C compiler. For more information on Mailman, including links to file downloads, please see the Mailman WWW page: http://www.gnu.org/software/mailman And its mirrors at: http://mailman.sourceforge.net http://www.list.org (Note: not all of the mirrors are updated yet.) Downloads are available at http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=103&release_id=60758 There are email lists (managed by Mailman, of course!) for both Mailman users and developers. See the web sites above for details. Cheers, -Barry -------------------- snip snip -------------------- 2.0.7 (09-Nov-2001) Security fixes: - Closed a hole in cookie management whereby some carefully crafted untrusted cookie data could crash Mailman if used with Python 1.5.2, or cause some unintended class constructors to be run on the server. - In the DSN.py bounce handler, a message that was DSN-like, but which was missing a "report-type" parameter could cause a non-deletable bounce message to crash Mailman forever, requiring manual intervention. Bug fixes: - Stray % signs in headers and footers could cause crashes. Now they'll just cause an [INVALID HEADER] or [INVALID FOOTER] string to be added. - The mail->news gateway has been made more robust in the face of duplicate headers, and reserved headers that some news servers reject. If the message is still rejected, it is saved in $prefix/nntp instead of discarded. - Hand-crafted invalid chunk number in membership management display could cause a traceback.

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[website] OOMadness site open ! OO stuff and genetic algo.
by Jiba 07 Nov '01

07 Nov '01

I've just opened by website OOMadness at : http://oomadness.tuxfamily.org/ There's currently 2 interesting Python packages : ----------- PyObjTool 0.1 ----------- XHAT IT IS : Different interesting modules for extreme OO programming ! EventObj : add change-event to any Python object, so you will be notified for all object modification. TreeWidget : (yet another) tree widget for Tkinter; this one is optimized for big number of nodes (10000+). EditObj : edit any Python object in a property list. Support also edition of lists and dicts. (yes, it is what java calls a "bean editor", but for Python !) ----------- Genetic 0.1 ----------- WHAT IT IS: Genetic algorythms in Python. I do not pretend to follow exately nature laws, but rather to try and experiment new Python programming ways ! There's also a module for genetic programming, but result are disappointing... The package includes several Tkinter demos (TSP, ...), enjoy ! --------------------------------- Jiba

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[Module] Python/CLIPS interface
by Vladimir Ulogov 06 Nov '01

06 Nov '01

Python/CLIPS interface ---------------------- SWIG Interface for CLIPS production system If you do want to build expert system using Python interface. This tool is for you. URL: http://www.python.eu.org/software/clips Download: http://www.python.eu.org/software/download/mp_entries/getEntryFieldbyPath/9… License: Public Domain Requires: CLIPS, Swig Categories: Utility Apps, Python/AI Vladimir Ulogov (gandalf(a)python.eu.org) -- <a href="http://www.python.eu.org/software/clips">Python/CLIPS interface</a> -- SWIG Interface for CLIPS production system

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Version 1.10 of the ReportLab toolkit released
by John Precedo 06 Nov '01

06 Nov '01

Version 1.10 of the ReportLab toolkit has been released. Reportlab is a cross-platform library for generating PDF files from Python, without relying on any third-party tools from Adobe or other vendors. The main feature of this release is the addition of support for Asian fonts, embedding your own Type-1 fonts and using custom encodings. These have been available in our developer CVS snapshots in the past, but are now robust enough to be considered non-experimental. While stable, they will continue to be improved and expanded in the future. Other features include improvements to the graphics/charts subpackage (our growing library of business charting diagrams) including improvements to the shading options for barcharts, and improvements to flags and symbols under graphics/widgets (our reusable widget libraries). The Reportlab library is Open Source (under a FreeBSD-like license), and comes with full documentation (which now covers font embedding in detail and using the new Asian fonts capabilities). Reportlab now allows you to create professional, portable and _international_ documents. Download it from: http://www.reportlab.com/download.html or using anonymous FTP from: ftp://ftp.reportlab.com/ The discussion group for the project is http://www.egroups.com/group/reportlab-users ; subscribe on the web, or send an email to reportlab-users-subscribe(a)egroups.com with 'Subscribe' in the subject line. -- John Precedo (johnp(a)reportlab.com) Developer Reportlab Europe Ltd (http://www.reportlab.com)

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[ANNOUNCE] pyCGNS v0.3
by Marc Poinot 06 Nov '01

06 Nov '01

This new version has many changes and extensions, the demos and tests are running ok, but a user of previous version should have to change some "imports" and name spaces. There is now a SIDS grammar parse tool (Sift), which could be used to check the SIDS instance grammar. It is built using the SPARK parser generator using a BNF grammar. So far, Sift only checks the syntax. Please, have a look and let me know about good or bad news :) The package has been put on the elsA web site, the URL is http://elsa.onera.fr/CGNS/releases -MP- ----------------------------------------------------------------------- Marc POINOT Alias: marcvs Email: poinot(a)onera.fr ONERA -MFE/DSNA/ELSA Tel: 01.46.73.42.84 Info: elsa-info(a)onera.fr 29, Div. Leclerc Fax: 01.46.73.41.66 Site: 92322 Chatillon FRANCE Project: elsA Web: http://www.onera.fr

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csv-0.5 released
by Dave Cole 05 Nov '01

05 Nov '01

The CSV module provides a fast CSV parser which can split and join CSV records which have been produced by Microsoft products such as Access and Excel. On Python 2.x the module outperforms string.split(). Of course the CSV parser can handle much more complex records than string.split()... This is a bugfix release. The changes in this release are: 1- Fixed bug in memory allocation of internal parser buffer - thanks to John Machin for pointing this out. 2- Fixed compile warning on Solaris - thanks to Adam Goucher for reporting this. The module homepage: http://www.object-craft.com.au/projects/csv/ For people who do not have a C compiler on Windows I have put a Python 2.1 binary up here: http://www.object-craft.com.au/projects/csv/csv.pyd - Dave

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ANN: Twisted 0.12.0 released
by carmstro＠twistedmatrix.com 05 Nov '01

05 Nov '01

Twisted, version 0.12.0, was released yesterday (November 4, 2001). This was a major feature/bugfix release, which went rather smoothly. It is available at http://twistedmatrix.com/. The new things going on since 0.11.0: Unified the twisted.internet main loop approach to thread dispatching. This involved merging internet.threadtask into internet.task, and making a new threadtask - a threadpool subclass that integrates with twisted's event loop. Many minor refactorings. This included cleanup to move generic 'thread ownership' code to 'log ownership' where it really belongs. Many major bugfixes, most notably to twisted.spread and Instance Messenger, twisted's IM client. Added XML-RPC web resource, and fixed a few issues in twisted.web. Major speed improvement to twisted on jython, and some speed improvements to threaded twisted. Updates to twisted.python.usage. Beginning to revitalize twisted.enterprise: in this release, twisted.enterprise.adbapi, an asynchronous wrapper for python's DB-API 2.0. What is Twisted? Twisted is an event-based framework for internet applications. It includes a web server, a telnet server, a multiplayer RPG engine, a generic client and server for remote object access, and APIs for creating new protocols and services. Twisted supports integration of the Tk or GTK event loop with it's main event loop. It also has basic support for running servers on top of jython. Twisted currently supports the following protocols, all implemented in pure python, most of them as both servers and clients: - FTP - HTTP - SMTP - irc - telnet - POP3 - AOL's instant messaging TOC - DNS (client only) - LDAP (client only) - finger - Echo, discard, chargen and friends - Perspective Broker For more information, visit http://www.twistedmatrix.com.

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[ANNOUNCE] TMDA 0.40 - SPAM reduction system (now supports Exim)
by Jason R. Mastaler 05 Nov '01

05 Nov '01

TMDA now supports the Exim MTA in addition to Postfix and qmail. TMDA is an OSI certified Python application designed to significantly reduce the amount of SPAM/UCE you receive. TMDA combines a "whitelist" (for known/trusted senders), a "blacklist" (for undesired senders), and a cryptographically enhanced confirmation system (for unknown, but legitimate senders). TMDA strives to be more effectual, yet less time-consuming than traditional filters. For more information including a demonstration, download locations and installation instructions, visit the TMDA homepage: <URL:http://tmda.sourceforge.net/> Enjoy, Jason R. Mastaler <P><A HREF="http://tmda.sourceforge.net/">TMDA 0.40</A> - SPAM reduction system (05-Nov-2001)

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[Application] askMerlin
by Ron Stephens 03 Nov '01

03 Nov '01

askMerlin --------- Your Digital Oracle, Merlin will answer your every question. askMerlin is a web based AI program. Merlin prompts you for a question, which you then type in and hit return. Then Merlin will prompt you for options or choices as possible answers to your question. Merlin will then think it over by consulting the world wide web, which is full of knowledge. Merlin will answer every question, even those for which you offer no options; however, Merlin gives better answers when you ask a well phrased question and also offer good options. The WWW is a large knowledge base from which to draw, thus askMerlin is a sort of Expert System with a large but heterogeneous knowledge base. Hopefully, Merlin will gain in wisdom over time as the legions of Parnassus help to hewn his code to a sharper and sharper edge. For now, askMerlin is a fun program, easy to use, with hope for the future. This is a fun project, and it is hoped that anyone interested will contribute to further improvements of askMerlin. URL: http://www.awaretek.com/python.html Download: http://www.awaretek.com/askMerlin.py License: LGPL Platform: all platforms Requires: urllib, sys, re, string Gui: command line Categories: Miscellany, Applications Ron Stephens (rdsteph(a)earthlink.net) http://www.awaretek.com -- <a href="http://www.awaretek.com/python.html">askMerlin</a> -- Your Digital Oracle, Merlin will answer your every question.

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