Mailman 3 September 2003 - Python-announce-list

[ANN] pwig: extending SWIG on Python
by sfandino＠yahoo.com 15 Sep '03

15 Sep '03

Hi, I have released pwig, an SWIG extension that allows new language modules to be developed using Python instead of C++. To stop any confusion I'll explain it another way: It's a Python SWIG wrapping for SWIG itself! It also includes a module (obviously written on Python :-) to generate wrappers for SWI-Prolog. pwig home site is at http://pwig.sourceforge.net Comments, questions, bugs, patches, new language modules, etc. are welcome! Bye, - Salva

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python-dev Summary for 2003-08-16 through 2003-08-31
by Brett C. 13 Sep '03

13 Sep '03

python-dev Summary for 2003-08-16 through 2003-08-31 ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ This is a summary of traffic on the `python-dev mailing list`_ from August 16, 2003 through August 31, 2003. It is intended to inform the wider Python community of on-going developments on the list. To comment on anything mentioned here, just post to python-list(a)python.org or `comp.lang.python`_ with a subject line mentioning what you are discussing. All python-dev members are interested in seeing ideas discussed by the community, so don't hesitate to take a stance on something. And if all of this really interests you then get involved and join `python-dev`_! This is the twenty-fourth summary written by Brett Cannon (a year's worth of summaries by yours truly now under his belt; does this mean I am certifiably insane?). All summaries are archived at http://www.python.org/dev/summary/ . Please note that this summary is written using reStructuredText_ which can be found at http://docutils.sf.net/rst.html . Any unfamiliar punctuation is probably markup for reST_ (otherwise it is probably regular expression syntax or a typo =); you can safely ignore it, although I suggest learning reST; its simple and is accepted for `PEP markup`_ and gives some perks for the HTML output. Also, because of the wonders of programs that like to reformat text, I cannot guarantee you will be able to run the text version of this summary through Docutils_ as-is unless it is from the original text file. .. _PEP Markup: http://www.python.org/peps/pep-0012.html The in-development version of the documentation for Python can be found at http://www.python.org/dev/doc/devel/ and should be used when looking up any documentation on something mentioned here. Python PEPs (Python Enhancement Proposals) are located at http://www.python.org/peps/ . To view files in the Python CVS online, go to http://cvs.sourceforge.net/cgi-bin/viewcvs.cgi/python/ . Reported bugs and suggested patches can be found at the SourceForge_ project page. .. _python-dev: http://www.python.org/dev/ .. _SourceForge: http://sourceforge.net/tracker/?group_id=5470 .. _python-dev mailing list: http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-dev .. _comp.lang.python: http://groups.google.com/groups?q=comp.lang.python .. _Docutils: http://docutils.sf.net/ .. _reST: .. _reStructuredText: http://docutils.sf.net/rst.html .. contents:: .. _last summary: http://www.python.org/dev/summary/2003-08-01_2003-08-15.html ===================== Summary Announcements ===================== This is the twenty-fourth summary written by me. This is significant because this means I have written enough summaries to cover a year's worth of email traffic on python-dev (had I not taken a summary off back in October this milestone would have been hit for the first half of August which represented a physical year since I started doing the summaries). It has truly been worth the experience. But how much of an experience has it been? Well, for a long time now I have been planning on writing some code to calculate how much email I have read, who wrote most of that email, and what threads made up the most. With my move to San Luis Obispo finished I finally had a chance to write said code in an imperfect manner (imperfect because of things like names which are a pain because some people have their name set differently at different computers; "Barry Warsaw" compared to "Barry A. Warsaw"; threads are worse thanks to the changing of subject titles in the middle of a thread) so as to give me some approximate numbers. I have read 9469 emails that have passed through the python-dev mailing list. The top six emailers (out of approx. 433 unique emailers) have been: * Brett Cannon (277 emails when you deal with me just using my last initial; 2.9% of all emails) * Barry Warsaw (305 emails when you also count his middle initial; 3.2%) * Skip Montanaro (481 emails; 5.1%) * Martin v. Löwis (627 emails, when calculated looking for all names that had "Martin" and "wis" in them; 6.6%) * Tim Peters (694 emails; 7.3%) * Guido van Rossum (a whopping 1407 emails; 14.8%) The average person posted 21.9 emails over the emails I covered. But only about 24 people had more than a single percentage (more than 94 emails) worth of emails accredited to them. That means that about 5.5% of the unique posters on python-dev accounted for 66.8% of all email (and I have gotten to know a good amount of those 24). As for threads (of which there were approx. 1252 unique threads, and I mean approximately), the top five are: * "type categories" (115 emails; 1.2% of all emails) * "PEP239 (Rational Numbers) Reference Implementation and new issues" (123 emails; 1.3%) * "PEP-317" (125 emails: 1.3%) * "python/dist/src/Python import.c,2.210,2.211" (146 emails; 1.5%) * "Extended Function syntax" (263 emails; 2.8%) What does this tell you and me? First, I have an addiction to Python. Second, PEPs really do get discussed. And third, Python development is alive and well. OK, enough statistics. As for this summary, it turned out rather light thanks to a couple of things. One is the shutdown of mail delivery by mail.python.org during the SoBig virus' peak. This not only cut back on the number of emails, but also led to me deleting *a lot* of bogus email on my other emails accounts. My blanket deleting may have caught legitimate emails so it is possible I accidently deleted some python-dev stuff, although if I did it was minimal. Another contributing factor to the light summary is that a lot of regulars on python-dev were on vacation. This looks like it will happen again for the first half of September so expect the next summary to be light as well. ========= Summaries ========= ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Python using Parrot; new code interpreter or strange evolutionary parternship? ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Pirate_ has now reached version 0.01 alpha. It lacks classes and imports but can run a decent amount of Python code. At least there is now a proof-of-concept that Python running on top of the Parrot_ VM is possible. .. _Pirate: http://pirate.tangentcode.com/ .. _Parrot: http://www.parrotcode.org/ Contributing threads: - `pirate 0.01 alpha! <http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2003-August/037684.html>`__ ------------------------ Python 2.3.1 on its way? ------------------------ Raymond Hettinger suggesting pushing for a quick release of Python 2.3.1 so that the 2.3 branch could be established as a stable version. Several bugs and performance enhancements have been committed to the 2.3 maintenance branch. Anthony Baxter stepped forward as release czar with Raymond Hettinger saying he would help and Barry Warsaw volunteering his wisdom as a battle-hardened release czar. This discussion also brought up the question of whether a .chm help file for the Windows distribution would be worth using instead of including the HTML distribution of the documentation as it stands now. It was agreed that it was a good thing to have since it allowed for better searching. Tim Peters also discovered the install went faster since it would not have to copy a ton of individual HTML files. Python 2.3.1 has a "verbal" release date of the third week of September; there has not been a PEP to set the release schedule officially. Help would be appreciated in dealing with bug and patch reports on SourceForge. Even if all you do is add a comment saying "this patch looks fine" or "I can reproduce this bug" it can be a great help. Contributing threads: - `Py2.3.1 <http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2003-August/037687.html>`__ - `HTMLHelp for Py2.3.1 <http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2003-August/037866.html>`__ - `Fixing Patches and Bugs for Py2.3.1 <http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2003-August/037840.html>`__ ---------------------------------------- Making looping generators more efficient ---------------------------------------- Would you like to see deeply nested generators be more efficient in returning their values? Clark Evans would and made such a request. He essentially wanted to have nested generator calls propogate their values to the first non-generator call directly and thus bypass all of the generator maintenance code. There was no direct reaction to this. Shane Holloway followed with the idea of having special syntax for when you yield each value of an iterator. The idea, once again, would be to speed this common case in the interpreter by skipping some bookkeeping overhead. A few syntax versions were offered, but the idea was all the same: special-case ``for item in iterable: yield item`` to something like ``yield *iterable``. Contributing threads: - `cooperative generators <http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2003-August/037708.html>`__ - `Graph exploration with generators <http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2003-August/037738.html>`__ -------------------------------------------------- Use of the logging package in the standard library -------------------------------------------------- Want to help out the development of Python? Know how to use the logging package? Then python-dev wants you! There are several modules in the stdlib that have home-grown logging code that could (and probably should) be using the logging package instead to simplify life. Read the email that started the contributing thread and see if you can't help out by converting the module over to using the logging package today! Contributing threads: - `Unification of logging in Python's Standard Library <http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2003-August/037743.html>`__ ----------------------- Some waxings on PEP 310 ----------------------- PEP 310 proposes the 'with' syntax that came up a while back that sparked an immense discussion on python-dev. The idea was to have a more fool-proof way of having an enter and exit method be called before executing some specified code. The common example was acquiring a lock, executing some code, and then releasing the lock all without having to deal with an explicit try/finally statement. Samuele Pedroni tried to clarify how it should work exactly by requiring __exit__ instead of making it optional (read the PEP to understand what this means). Contributing threads: - `PEP 310(with-syntax): close synonym of __exit__ <http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2003-August/037795.html>`__ ------------------------------------------------ Proposed PEP for a 'close' method for generators ------------------------------------------------ Samuele Pedroni has written a pre-PEP on defining a way to have generators grow a way to have a 'close' method that is called when their execution is finished so as to handle resources correctly. This is in response to not being able to contain yield statements within try/finally blocks. Contributing threads: - `pre-PEP: Resource-Release Support for Generators <http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2003-August/037803.html>`__ ----------------- email-sig created ----------------- Barry Warsaw has created the `email-sig`_ to steer development of version 3 of the email package in hopes of having it done for Python 2.4 . .. _email-sig: http://www.python.org/sigs/email-sig/ Contributing threads: - `New SIG: email-sig <New SIG: email-sig>`__

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ANN: gfsqlite: a simple SQL-Shell for SQLite-Databases
by walter.spiegel＠web.de 12 Sep '03

12 Sep '03

Hi, gfsqlite is a simple SQL-Shell for SQLite-Databases based on pysqlite (http://pysqlite.sourceforge.net/) and gfplus (by J. Berliner) with a Tk-style interface. Gfsqlite should run under Python (version 2.2 or later) and is tested under Linux and Win32. There is an english/german-interface, but the Documentation for gfsqlite is in german! Gfsqlite is located at http://www.wspiegel.de/gfsqlite/index.html Download: http://www.wspiegel.de/gfsqlite/gfsqlite.zip Have Fun Walter Spiegel

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Toronto-area Python user group September meeting
by Peter Hansen 12 Sep '03

12 Sep '03

The next meeting of PyGTA will be held at the usual location and time, on Tuesday September 23. Site: 519 Church St. Community Centre Room no: 31 (signs will be posted) Address: 519 Church St., near Wellesley Date: Tuesday, September 23 Time: 8-10 PM A later announcement will provide details of any presentation which might be occurring that evening... I missed the last couple but understand they went very well, with interesting presentations and discussion. (Hmm.... maybe I should be staying away from more of them? ;-) Don't miss out! -Peter Hansen, for the PyGTA gang...

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ANN: CUTE 0.2 released
by Heiko Köhler 12 Sep '03

12 Sep '03

This version is beta software. CUTE is a QT and Scintilla based code editor, scriptable with python. CUTE is completely configured with python scripts. The python API allows to define new commands, which can be mapped to a shortcut or added to a menu. There is a handbook for CUTE, but this is still work in progress. The CUTE/python API is also documented. CUTE`s page is http://cute.sourceforge.net Regards, Heiko Köhler

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Latest release of SalStat - version 20030911
by alan_salmoni＠yahoo.com 11 Sep '03

11 Sep '03

Hi folks & Pythonistas! I have just made a new source-code only release of SalStat - version 20030911 (codenamed "Texas!") which is available at the website http://salstat.sunsite.dk. The download is http://salstat.sunsite.dk/salstat.20030911.tar.gz (447k or thereabouts). Sorry, but binaries are not available as I'm up to my ears in Ph.D. work right now. SalStat is a Python/wxPython application for statistical analysis, a bit like a low-powered SPSS, but is growing all the time (should grow faster when my Ph.D. is finished..!), and is available under the GPL. I have also merged in wxPyPlot to produce some basic charts which can be saved in bitmapped graphics format (bmp, png and jpeg if I'm not mistaken). This version also features data transformations with buttons for common transforms (square, square root, reciprocal and log), but users can also enter whatever Python function they want. The transforms are non-destructive - any transformed data are automatically put into a new data column, leaving the existing data untouched. Future plans: Finished the xml data format which will enable users to audit their entire analysis session; add the multi-factorial anova (plus post-hoc tests and simple effects); improve the charting / graphing; move the code base up to Python 2.3 and wxPython 2.4.x; release executables for Windows & Linux; Add post-hoc analysis procecures for the nonparametric tests like Kruskal Wallis and Friedmans; Save the world from certain destruction... And dominate it... Joking about the last two. ;) All bug reports and suggestions for interface improvements are, as usual, more than welcome. Have fun! Alan James Salmoni SalStat Statistics http://salstat.sunsite.dk

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ANN: Tesselatica 0.1 - an OS X demo for interactively exploring rect. tessalations
by Dinu Gherman 11 Sep '03

11 Sep '03

Hi, need a break, soon... With PyObjC the most difficult thing increa- singly becomes writing the README... "Tesselatica" is a very simple "tesselation explorer", although restricted to only very specific ones. As such it maybe makes a nice demo, but I won't tell yet, what the background for this is... ;-) Please see the attached Readme below. Comments are appreciated! Regards, Dinu -- Dinu C. Gherman ...................................................................... "Of course America had often been discovered before Columbus, but it had always been hushed up." (Oscar Wilde) Tesselatica =========== Summary ------- Tesselatica is a demo for interactively exploring rect. tessalations. Overview -------- Tesselatica is a Mac OS X demo tool for interactively exploring some kind of regular rectangular tesselations with certain mathematical constraints. Basics ------ Tesselatica is very intuitive to use. It displays a rectangular view, devided into N equally sized rectangular tiles. The only constraint for these tiles is that their shape must be as close to a square as possible. As you change N and the size of the entire window, the optimal tesselation is being calculated and displayed (I hope). History ------- :0.1: first release, packaged with Python 2.2.3 and PyObjC 1.0b. Requirements ------------ There are no special requirements for running Tesselatica. It ships as a standalone application which should be running on any Mac OS X 10.x, althouth it was developped on 10.2. As it comes with full source code you can build Tesselatica yourself, if you have Apple's developer tools installed, plus some Python interpreter version 2.2 or higher, plus PyObjC 1.0b [1]_. Licence ------- Tesselatica is released under the GPL - see the included file, "GPL.txt". Download -------- The Tesselatica distribution, screenshots and a sample movie of Tesselatica in action are all available from: http://python.net/~gherman/Tesselatica.html Notes ------ Tesselatica is a very simple demo and does what I wanted it to do. Future ------ Of course, one might want to explor all sorts of regular tesselations, not only the specific rectangular ones shown here. I don't have any plans to do that, but feel free to take this as a starting point! Links ----- .. [1] http://pyobjc.sourceforge.net Author ------ Dinu Gherman, dinu at mac dot com, 2003-09-11

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ANN: TimeCyclerLab 0.1 - a prototyping workbench for a similar OS X screensaver
by Dinu Gherman 11 Sep '03

11 Sep '03

Hi, and on we go.... "TimeCyclerLab" is a light prototyping workbench for my TimeCycler screensaver on Mac OS X. The PyObjC code is *so* much simpler compared to the ObjC one for the real screensaver! Please see the attached Readme below. Glad to hear your comments! Regards, Dinu -- Dinu C. Gherman ...................................................................... "I am a gentlemen: I live by robbing the poor." (George Bernard Shaw) TimeCyclerLab ============= Summary ------- TimeCyclerLab is a prototyping workbench for a similar screensaver. Overview -------- TimeCyclerLab is a Mac OS X Cocoa GUI tool which has been used for prototyping the TimeCycler screensaver [1]_. It provides two modes, interactive and clock mode and serves as graphic testing workbench. Basics ------ TimeCyclerLab provides a nested set of stacked circular progress bars - in other words: an analog clock! This application allows to set the individual hands interactively by just clicking and/or dragging them in interactive mode. In clock mode the analog clock shows the current time. History ------- :0.1: first release, packaged with Python 2.2.3 and PyObjC 1.0b [2]_. Requirements ------------ There are no special requirements for running TimeCyclerLab. It ships as a standalone application which should be running on any Mac OS X 10.x, althouth it was developped on 10.2. As it comes with full source code you can build TimeCyclerLab yourself, if you have Apple's developer tools installed, plus some Python interpreter version 2.2 or higher, plus PyObjC 1.0b. Licence ------- TimeCyclerLab is released under the GPL - see the included file, "GPL.txt". Download -------- The TimeCyclerLab distribution, screenshots and a sample movie of TimeCyclerLab in action are all available from: http://python.net/~gherman/TimeCyclerLab.html Notes ------ I tried using the ubiquitous metal look for TimeCyclerLab, but when doing so, it behaves really strange: when dragging single clock hands the entire window moves across the screen. I'd be interested to know how to fix this... Future ------ TimeCycler, the real screensaver which was prototyped using this application contains many more knobs to play with. I'll probably bring all of them back to to this prototype, again, one day. Links ----- .. [1] http://python.net/~gherman/TimeCycler.html .. [2] http://pyunit.sourceforge.net/ Author ------ Dinu Gherman, dinu at mac dot com, 2003-09-11

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ANN: Python Computer Graphics Kit v1.0.1
by Matthias Baas 10 Sep '03

10 Sep '03

The first non-beta release of the Python Computer Graphics Kit is available at http://cgkit.sourceforge.net What is it? ----------- The kit is a collection of Python modules that contain the basic types and functions required for creating 3D computer graphics images. The kit includes several new types such as vectors, matrices and quaternions. It contains a binding for Pixar's RenderMan interface which is a renderer independent API to communicate 3D data to renderers which will finally produce a 2D image. There are already several RenderMan compliant renderers freely available (they are not part of the kit). The kit also includes some of the functionality from the RenderMan Shading Language which enables you to create procedural models or textures from within Python. Even though the kit focuses on RenderMan, the new types or the Shading Language functionality can also be used for other rendering mechanism such as OpenGL or other renderers such as POV-Ray. The kit should run on any platform where Python (and a C/C++ compiler) is available. Windows users can download a binary version for Python 2.2 and Python 2.3. What's new? ----------- Finished the previously incomplete modules and added the corresponding documentation. For a list of other minor bug fixes and enhancements see the change log. There has been release 1.0 available for a couple of days but the binary for Python 2.2 was broken and the source zip contained a modified version of the pre-generated file cgtypes.c which didn't work on Linux. Release 1.0.1 is fixing these issues. If you were among those who downloaded release 1.0 and you got it to work then you don't have to download 1.0.1 again as there's no difference in functionality. For more information, visit: http://cgkit.sourceforge.net - Matthias -

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ANN hashtar 0.1: archival encryption to corruptible media
by John Hunter 10 Sep '03

10 Sep '03

hashtar is a utility designed for encrypted archiving to media vulnerable to corruption (eg, CDR, DVDR). http://nitace.bsd.uchicago.edu:8080/hashtar Comments, bug reports, suggestions for improvement all welcome. John Hunter OVERVIEW hashtar: an encrypted archive utility designed for secure archiving to media vulnerable to corruption. Recursively encrypt the files and directories passed as arguments. Rather than preserving the directory structure, or archiving to a single file as in tar, the files are encrypted to a single dir and named with the hash of their relative path. The file information (filename, hash, permission mode, uid, gid) is encrypted and stored in the header of the file itself, and can be used to restore the original file with dir structure from the archive file. For example, the command > hashtar.py -cvf tmp.htar finance/ prompts for a password and generates an encrypted recursive archive of the finance dir in the tmp.htar dir, with filenames mapped like finance/irs/98/f1040.pdf -> tmp.htar/e5/e5ed546c0bc0191d80d791bc2f73c890 finance/sale_house/notes -> tmp.htar/58/580e89bad7563ae76c295f75aecea030 finance/online/accounts.gz.mcr -> tmp.htar/bb/bbf12f06dc3fcee04067d40b9781f4a8 finance/phone/prepaid1242.doc -> tmp.htar/c1/c1fe52a9d8cbef55eff8840d379d972a The encrypted files are placed in subdirs based on the first two characters in their hash name because if too many files are placed in one dir, it may not be possible to pass all of them as command line arguments to the restore command. The entire finance dir structure can later be restored with > hashtar.py -xvf tmp.htar The advantage of this method of encrypted archiving, as opposed to archiving to a single tar file and encrypting it, is that this method is not sensitive to single byte corruption, which becomes important especially on externally stored archives, such as on CDR, or DVDR. Any individual file contains all the information needed to restore itself, with directory structure, permission bits, etc. So only the specific files that are corrupted on the media will be lost. The alternative strategy, encrypting all the files in place and then archiving to external media, doesn't suffer from single byte corruption but affords less privacy since the filenames, dir structure, and permission bits are available, and less security since a filename may indicate contents and thus expose the archive to a known plaintext attack. A match string allows you to only extract files matching a given pattern. Eg, to only extract pdf and xls files, do > hashtar.py -m pdf,xls -xvf tmp.htar Because the filenames are stored in the header, only a small portion of the file needs to be decrypted to determine the match, so this is quite fast. Data can be encrypted and decrypted across platforms (tested between linux and win32 and vice-versa) but of course some information may be lost, such as uid, gid for platforms that don't support it. USAGE: > hashtar.py [OPTIONS] files OPTIONS -h, --help Show help message and exit -fDIR, --arcdir=DIR Write hashed filenames to archive dir -pFILE, --passwdfile=FILE Get passwd from FILE, otherwise prompt -mPATTERN, --match=PATTERN Only extract files that match PATTERN. PATTERN is a comma separated list of strings, one of which must match the filename -u, --unlink Delete files after archiving them -c, --create Create archive dir -x, --extract Extract files recursively from archive dir -v, --verbose Decrypt files recursively WARNING: I think this software is suitable to protect your data from your sister, your boss, and even the nosy computer hacker next door, but not the NSA. REQUIREMENTS: python2.3 - python.org yawPyCrypto and Flatten - http://yawpycrypto.sourceforge.net/ pycrypto - http://www.amk.ca/python/code/crypto.html The python dependencies are very easy to install; just do the usual > python setup.py install PLATFORMS: Tested on linux and win32 AUTHOR: John D. Hunter <jdhunter(a)ace.bsd.uchicago.edu> LICENSE: same as python2.3 KNOWN BUGS: Ignores symbolic links DEDICATION: For Erik Curiel, who's life's work I lost when I volunteered to backup the only copy of his home dir on a CD containing a single encrypted gzipped tar file, which was subsequently corrupted.

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