Mailman 3 September 2004 - Python-announce-list

ANN: ClientCookie 1.0.0a released
by jjl＠pobox.com 16 Sep '04

16 Sep '04

http://wwwsearch.sourceforge.net/ClientCookie/ 0.4.19 is still the stable version. 0.4.x will not be actively maintained as soon as a final 1.0 release is out (which will happen when Python 2.4 is released). I will likely fix bugs in 0.4.x if asked, though. 1.0.0a is an alpha release of a "final" version, parts of which will be in Python 2.4, as new module cookielib and updates to urllib2. Although still alpha, the interface is now unlikely to change. This release contains lots of changes to bring ClientCookie into line with cookielib and Python 2.4's urllib2. Once a final patch has been applied to cookielib (I'm just about to upload the patch), anything in the ClientCookie interface that differs from 2.4's urllib2 / cookielib is probably a bug. ClientCookie will remain backwards-compatible with older Pythons. However, this release requires Python 2.0 or newer. Python 1.5.2 is no longer supported. For detailed history, please see the ChangeLog: http://wwwsearch.sourceforge.net/ClientCookie/src/ChangeLog.txt and the SVN repository: http://codespeak.net/svn/user/jjlee/wwwsearch/ClientCookie/trunk/ Backwards-incompatible changes from 0.4.x to 1.0.x: * RFC 2965 is now off by default. * AbstractHTTPHandler (hence all HTTP functionality) now uses httplib.HTTPConnection instead of httplib.HTTP. This means that ClientCookie now claims to be an HTTP/1.1 client instead of 1.0. Same goes for HTTPS. * CookieJar now knows nothing about files. If you want to write cookies to a file, and don't need to use a browser-compatible file format, use LWPCookieJar. CookieJars that know about files now derive from FileCookieJar. * FileCookieJar.load(), .revert() and .save() now raise LoadError in addition to IOError. * CookieJar.cookies attribute is now private. * Renamed ClientCookie.Request.iter_headers() to .header_items(). * Request.unverifiable and .origin_req_host are now private, replaced by methods .get_unverifiable() and .get_origin_req_hoot(). The constructor now has arguments to set these attributes. Some old code still returns urllib2.Request objects: in that case, set these attributes directly on the urllib2.Request, and RequestUpgradeProcessor will carry them over when upgrading them to ClientCookie.Request objects (yuck). * Cookie.rest is now private: use has_nonstandard_attr(), get_nonstandard_attr() and set_nonstandard_attr() instead. ClientCookie is a Python module for handling HTTP cookies on the client side, useful for accessing web sites that require cookies to be set and then returned later. It also provides some other (optional) useful stuff: HTTP-EQUIV and Refresh handling, automatic adding of the Referer [sic] header, robots.txt observance and lazily-seek()able responses. These extras are implemented using an extension that makes it easier to add new functionality to urllib2. It has developed from a port of Gisle Aas' Perl module HTTP::Cookies, from the libwww-perl library. Simple usage: import ClientCookie response = ClientCookie.urlopen("http://www.example.com/") This function behaves identically to urllib2.urlopen, except that it deals with cookies automatically. That's probably all you need to know. John

1 0

ANN: Leo 4.2 RC1: An outlining editor
by Edward K. Ream 15 Sep '04

15 Sep '04

Leo 4.2 Release Candidate 1 is now available at http://sourceforge.net/projects/leo/ This version fixes a number of minor bugs and adds several new features. See leoDocs.leo for full details. The highlights of Leo 4.2: - @thin trees make Leo much more friendly to cvs. - Leo's data structures have been reorganized to make outline operations significantly faster. All old script still work. - @test and @script nodes convert scripts to unit tests automatically. You can convert scripts to unit tests in seconds! - A faster and more robust spell checker plugin. (requires Python 2.3) - Leo is now much more friendly to using spaces instead of tabs. - The Execute Script command reports erroneous lines more clearly. - Leo draws large outlines more quickly with less memory used. - Dozens of other improvements. Quote of the month ------------------ Leo is the best IDE that I have had the pleasure to use. I have been using it now for about 2 -- 3 months. It has totally changed not only the way that I program, but also the way that I store and organize all of the information that I need for the job that I do. -- Ian Mulvany What is Leo? ------------ - A programmer's editor, an outlining editor and a flexible browser. - A literate programming tool, compatible with noweb and CWEB. - A data organizer and project manager. Leo provides multiple views of projects within a single outline. - Fully scriptable using Python. Leo saves its files in XML format. - Portable. leo.py is 100% pure Python. - Open Software, distributed under the Python License. Leo requires Python 2.2.1 or above and tcl/tk 8.4 or above. Leo works on Linux, Windows and MacOs X. Links: ------ Leo: http://webpages.charter.net/edreamleo/front.html Home: http://sourceforge.net/projects/leo/ Download: http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=3458 CVS: http://sourceforge.net/cvs/?group_id=3458 Wiki: http://leo.hd1.org/ Edward K. Ream September 14, 2004 -------------------------------------------------------------------- Edward K. Ream email: edreamleo(a)charter.net Leo: Literate Editor with Outlines Leo: http://webpages.charter.net/edreamleo/front.html --------------------------------------------------------------------

1 0

ZODB 3.3 release candidate 1 released
by Tim Peters 15 Sep '04

15 Sep '04

I'm pleased to announce the release of ZODB 3.3c1. This corresponds to the ZODB (and ZEO) that we intend to ship with ZopeX3-3.0.0 release candidate 1. You can download a source tarball or Windows installer from: http://zope.org/Products/ZODB3.3 3.3c1 incorporates a slew of small fixes, and one major incompatibility: when a transaction commit fails, all previous versions of ZODB aborted the transaction and implicitly began a new transaction. As discussed on the zope-dev and zodb-dev mailing lists, that can be damaging if one in a sequence of subtransaction commits mistakenly suppresses a commit exception. Starting with ZODB 3.3c1, after a commit fails subsequent attempts to commit, join or register with the transaction will also fail. The failing transaction must instead be explicitly discarded. See the news file for details: http://zope.org/Products/ZODB3.3/NEWS.html The intent is that 3.3c1 will be released again as ZODB 3.3 (final) shortly before the ZopeX3-3.0.0 final release. Note that ZODB 3.3 does not support any version of Zope 2.6 or 2.7.

1 0

Dr. Dobb's Python-URL! - weekly Python news and links (Sep 14)
by Cameron Laird 15 Sep '04

15 Sep '04

QOTW: "[T]he essence of software development is code/task factorization." Hung Jung Lu "[U]se the best tool for the job, and don't use any that preclude you from using others at the same time as well." Roger Binns "SciPy 2004 ... was a great success." http://groups.google.com/groups?th=cf4d033c9ca22c42 Notice, by the way, the new availability of *Python Scripting for Computational Science*. http://www.amk.ca/diary/archives/cat_python.html#003329 "In recent months several posters on comp.lang.python have suggested that Python would benefit from making it possible for people to comment on the documentation, an approach similar to the PHP docs." Andrew Kuchling didn't join the speculation on the desirability of such a hypothetical; rather, In his award-winning manner, he created it. Notice that discussion now focuses on optimization. http://groups.google.com/groups?frame=left&th=4e553e0347dd115c Magnus Lie Hetland launches a Wiki just to "chisel ... out a possible standard API ... for graphs in Python." Notice that, by the end of the thread, the Wiki is *not* temporary. http://groups.google.com/groups?frame=left&th=93df0776394aa6f0 In a single thread, Alex Martelli both: enlists the tokenize module to introduce examples of the advantages of the new iterator protocol; and illustrates ways to leverage tokenize() to handle tokens unknown to base Python. http://groups.google.com/groups?frame=left&th=b9914fda3566bbd0 Bryan Olson argues that David Mertz's "weightless threads" are weak--weaker, at least, than true co-routines. http://groups.google.com/groups?frame=left&th=ca4b3ec6501d42aa Is there a problem greenlets solve? Did Churchill and Fermi share a speechwriter? http://groups.google.com/groups?frame=left&th=696336311fa0f429 http://groups.google.com/groups?frame=left&th=c802f304c8eafcc3 Alex Martelli makes the case that you, too, can readily learn enough to be a time wizard. http://groups.google.com/groups?th=135ee8f8e6a362f5 ======================================================================== Everything Python-related you want is probably one or two clicks away in these pages: Python.org's Python Language Website is the traditional center of Pythonia http://www.python.org Notice especially the master FAQ http://www.python.org/doc/FAQ.html PythonWare complements the digest you're reading with the marvelous daily python url http://www.pythonware.com/daily Mygale is a news-gathering webcrawler that specializes in (new) World-Wide Web articles related to Python. http://www.awaretek.com/nowak/mygale.html While cosmetically similar, Mygale and the Daily Python-URL are utterly different in their technologies and generally in their results. comp.lang.python.announce announces new Python software. Be sure to scan this newsgroup weekly. http://groups.google.com/groups?oi=djq&as_ugroup=comp.lang.python.announce Brett Cannon continues the marvelous tradition established by Andrew Kuchling and Michael Hudson of intelligently summarizing action on the python-dev mailing list once every other week. http://www.python.org/dev/summary/ The Python Package Index catalogues packages. http://www.python.org/pypi/ The somewhat older Vaults of Parnassus ambitiously collects references to all sorts of Python resources. http://www.vex.net/~x/parnassus/ Much of Python's real work takes place on Special-Interest Group mailing lists http://www.python.org/sigs/ The Python Business Forum "further[s] the interests of companies that base their business on ... Python." http://www.python-in-business.org Python Success Stories--from air-traffic control to on-line match-making--can inspire you or decision-makers to whom you're subject with a vision of what the language makes practical. http://www.pythonology.com/success The Python Software Foundation (PSF) has replaced the Python Consortium as an independent nexus of activity. It has official responsibility for Python's development and maintenance. http://www.python.org/psf/ Among the ways you can support PSF is with a donation. http://www.python.org/psf/donate.html Cetus collects Python hyperlinks. http://www.cetus-links.org/oo_python.html Python FAQTS http://python.faqts.com/ The Cookbook is a collaborative effort to capture useful and interesting recipes. http://aspn.activestate.com/ASPN/Cookbook/Python Among several Python-oriented RSS/RDF feeds available are http://www.python.org/channews.rdf http://bootleg-rss.g-blog.net/pythonware_com_daily.pcgi http://python.de/backend.php For more, see http://www.syndic8.com/feedlist.php?ShowMatch=python&ShowStatus=all The old Python "To-Do List" now lives principally in a SourceForge reincarnation. http://sourceforge.net/tracker/?atid=355470&group_id=5470&func=browse http://python.sourceforge.net/peps/pep-0042.html The online Python Journal is posted at pythonjournal.cognizor.com. editor(a)pythonjournal.com and editor(a)pythonjournal.cognizor.com welcome submission of material that helps people's understanding of Python use, and offer Web presentation of your work. *Py: the Journal of the Python Language* http://www.pyzine.com Archive probing tricks of the trade: http://groups.google.com/groups?oi=djq&as_ugroup=comp.lang.python&num=100 http://groups.google.com/groups?meta=site%3Dgroups%26group%3Dcomp.lang.pyth… Previous - (U)se the (R)esource, (L)uke! - messages are listed here: http://www.ddj.com/topics/pythonurl/ http://purl.org/thecliff/python/url.html (dormant) or http://groups.google.com/groups?oi=djq&as_q=+Python-URL!&as_ugroup=comp.lan… Suggestions/corrections for next week's posting are always welcome. E-mail to <Python-URL(a)phaseit.net> should get through. To receive a new issue of this posting in e-mail each Monday morning (approximately), ask <claird(a)phaseit.net> 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.

1 0

ANN: Foundations of Python Network Programming
by John Goerzen 14 Sep '04

14 Sep '04

Hi, I'd like to announce the availability of my latest book, Foundations of Python Network Programming, published by APress. Magnus Lie Hetland (author of Practical Python) was the technical reviewer and Jason Gilmore (author of A Programmer's Introduction to PHP 4.0) was the lead editor for this book. Foundations of Python Network Programming is designed to show you everything from fundamentals of networking and low-level protocol design to work with higher-level protocols such as IMAP, HTTP, and FTP. This is not a basic reference like Python comes with. Rather, it's a hands-on guide. There are over 6600 lines of example code and the text strives to show you the big picture. For instance, there are several different ways of getting directory information from an FTP server, and some are not documented for use this way. The chapter on FTP explains them and provides example code to illustrate. There's also an APress page with details (link below). The book is split into six parts: * Part I covers low-level networking. It starts out with the basic concepts of TCP/IP networking, then explains how to use sockets to write your own protocols or implement new protocols from scratch. In addition to basic TCP/IP client and server code, topics such as UDP, exception handling, forward and reverse DNS lookups, broadcast packets, half-open sockets, and IPv6 are covered. * Part II covers web services. It starts with the coverage of HTTP client support and goes on to cover HTML parsing, XML parsing and generation, and XML-RPC. * Part III covers e-mail. It first shows you how to build plain or MIME messages and how to process and decode those messages. The MIME coverage is quite extensive, covering things like multipart messages, attachments, varying character sets in headers, etc. The remaining chapters in the e-mail part cover SMTP client communication, POP3, and IMAP. The IMAP section covers the IMAP client library included with Twisted. * Part IV covers other client-side modules, including FTP, database clients (DB-API), and concludes with a discussion of SSL/TLS. That discussion covers both sock.ssl() and PyOpenSSL and documents authentication of the remote. * Part V covers server-side frameworks. These include SocketServer and its derivatives such as SimpleXMLRPCServer, CGI. In addition, there is a chapter on mod_python. It features re-implementations of the examples from the CGI chapter for a native mod_python implementation to make it easy to see how code is different when writing mod_python as opposed to CGI. * Finally, part VI covers multitasking with an emphasis on server design but including coverage of client design. The major topics covered include forking, threading, and single-process design using poll() or the Twisted infrastructure. For more information: Table of Contents, Cover images, letter, and links to pages at Amazon, bn, etc: http://www.complete.org/pynet APress book page (including sample code downloads): http://www.apress.com/book/bookDisplay.html?bID=363 Sample chapter: http://www.apress.com/book/supplementDownload.html?bID=363&sID=2077 ISBN: 1590593715 As usual, I welcome your e-mails and comments. <P> <A HREF="http://www.complete.org/pynet">Foundations of Python Network Programming</A> - new book covering networking in Python. (14-Sep-04)

1 0

EDDIE-Tool 0.34 Released
by Chris Miles 14 Sep '04

14 Sep '04

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 EDDIE-Tool 0.34 has just been released. http://eddie-tool.net/ What is it ? The EDDIE-Tool is an intelligent UNIX monitoring agent written entirely in Python. It provides system, network and security monitoring features, with an extensive configuration facility for defining customized monitoring and data collection rules. What is new ? This release contains a few bugfixes, better support for OpenBSD, Darwin and Redhat Enterprise Linux 3, and includes SNMP features out-of-the-box (no need for an external module now). Why is it interesting to Python users ? Besides system and network administrators, Python users may find EDDIE-Tool interesting as it is an example of a threaded, multi-platform software package, providing easy access to system statistics and using Python's power to offer a dynamic and programmable rules engine. Regards, Chris - -- Chris Miles http://chrismiles.info/ -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v1.2.4 (Darwin) iD8DBQFBRvOozitzBnMzNcIRAonhAJ9OfsbvcA/zujQDyMntOElsaVpCUgCgp64r MSHS14K1y8NLIy0jMxnYXrk= =w4g+ -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----

1 0

PyODB a Python unixODBC API binding
by Neil Moses 14 Sep '04

14 Sep '04

I would like to announce the first release of PyODB a Python unixODBC API binding. PyODB is a Python module and provides a simplified set of bindings to unixODBC (http://www.unixodbc.org) allowing fast and easy development of open database applications. The module supports multiple database connections using a connection class and two methods execute() and fetch() to handle SQL queries. Disconnection from the database is automatic using the class destructor. My main aim in producing this software was to hide the complexities of the ODBC C API from the programmer and so simplify application development. I imagine this might appeal to people providing dynamic content on a web server or anyone who wished to experiment with ODBC in developing small applications. The software has been developed on a Linux environment using Python 2.3 and SWIG (http://www.swig.org). The module has been tested on Linux and Solaris platforms using databases PostgreSQL and Informix, but should work on any platform supporting unixODBC and an ODBC database driver. To download the release visit https://sourceforge.net/projects/pyodb Regards, Neil Moses

1 0

ANN: Candygram 1.0 beta 2 (Python + Erlang)
by Michael Hobbs 14 Sep '04

14 Sep '04

The second beta version of Candygram is now available. The changes included in this release are: * Changed behavior of list patterns to repeat last element. (See documentation for details.) * A single Receiver object may now be used by multiple processes. * Added Receiver.removeHandler() method. * Can pass a Process subclass to spawn() and spawnLink(). * New wxProcess example class integrates Candygram with wxPython. * Updated FAQ. Candygram is a Python implementation of Erlang concurrency primitives. Erlang is widely respected for its elegant built-in facilities for concurrent programming. This package attempts to emulate those facilities as closely as possible in Python. With Candygram, developers can send and receive messages between threads using semantics nearly identical to those in the Erlang language. More information about Candygram can be found at http://candygram.sourceforge.net

1 0

ANN: PyOpenOffice 0.1 released
by Martin_Simon 14 Sep '04

14 Sep '04

Process OpenOffice.org Writer Files and transform them to PDF without installing OpenOffice.org What is PyOpenOffice? * It is a class library, written in the Python Language. * It is a platform-independent command-line utility (many abilities of the commandline interface are still missing) What can do PyOpenOffice do for you? * Make serial letters, database reports etc. from templates in the SXW-Format and store them anew as SXW-Files * Extract the pure text information from the SXW-Document and store it in a plain text file or a PDF-File * Perform simple transformations from SXW-Files to PDF-Files without installing OO - for example on a webserver What license has PyOpenOffice? * It is distributed under the GNU Public License What software is required? * Any operating system that supports the following software: * Python 2.3 (maybe it works form 2.1 upwards, but this is not recommended) for the SXW-Processing * The ReportlabToolkit and the Python Imaging Library for the transformation from SXW to PDF * OpenOffice.org for viewing and editing the templates * The PyOpenOffice-Zip-Package Homepage: http://www.bezirksreiter.de/PyOpenOffice.htm There you also find a "Live"-version to test it without installing. Martin Simon

1 0

ANN: numarray-1.1
by Todd Miller 13 Sep '04

13 Sep '04

Release Notes for numarray-1.1 Numarray is an array processing package designed to efficiently manipulate large multi-dimensional arrays. Numarray is modelled after Numeric and features c-code generated from python template scripts, the capacity to operate directly on arrays in files, and improved type promotions. Although numarray-1.1 is predominantly a bugfix release, if you use numarray, I strongly recommend upgrading. I. ENHANCEMENTS 986194 Add SMP threading Build/install with --smp to enable ufuncs to release the GIL during their compute loops. You have to supply your own threads and partition your array computations among them to realize any SMP benefit. This adds overhead so don't do it unless you have multiple CPUs and know how to manage multiple compute threads. 1016142 CharArray eval() too slow CharArray.fasteval() was modified to use strtod() rather than Python's eval(). This makes it ~70x faster for converting CharArrays to NumArrays. fasteval() no longer works for complex types. eval() still works for everything. 989618 Document memmap.py (memory mapping) 996177 Unsigned int type support limited 1008968 Add kroenecker product II. BUGS FIXED / CLOSED 984286 max.reduce of byteswapped array Sebastian Haase reported that the reduction of large (>100KB) byteswapped arrays did not work correctly. This bug affected reductions and accumulations of byteswapped and misaligned arrays causing them to produce incorrect answers. Thanks Sebastian! 1011456 numeric compatibility byteoffset numarray's Numeric compatibility C-API didn't correctly account for the byte offsets produced by sub-arrays and array slices. This was fixed by re-defining the meaning of the ->data pointer in the PyArrayObject struct to include byteoffset. NA_OFFSETDATA() was likewise redefined to return ->data rather than ->data + ->byteoffset. Correctly written code is still source compatible. Incorrectly written code will generally be transparently fixed. Code which accounted for byteoffset without using NA_OFFSETDATA() will break. This bug affected functions in numarray.numeric as well as add-on packages like numarray.linear_algebra and numarray.fft. 1009462 matrixmultiply (a,b) leaves b transposed Many people reported this side effect. Thanks to all. 919297 Windows build fails VC++ 7.0 964356 random_array.randint exceeds boundaries 985710 buffer not aligned on 8 byte boundary (Windows-98 broken) 990328 Object Array repr for >1000 elements 997898 Invalid sequences errors 1004600 Segfault in array element deletion 1005537 Incorrect handling of overlapping assignments in Numarray 1008375 Weirdness with 'new' method 1008462 searchsorted bug and fix 1009309 randint bug fix patch 1015896 a.is_c_array() mixed int/bool results 1016140 argsort of string arrays See http://sourceforge.net/tracker/?atid=450446&group_id=1369&func=browse for more details. III. CAUTIONS 1. This release is binary incompatible with numarray-1.0. Writers of C-extensions which directly reference the byteoffset field of the PyArrayObject should be aware that the data pointer is now the sum of byteoffset and the buffer base pointer. All C extensions which use the numarray C-API must be recompiled. This incompatibility was an unfortunate consequence of the fix for "numeric compatibility byteoffset". WHERE ----------- Numarray-1.1 windows executable installers, source code, and manual is here: http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=1369 Numarray is hosted by Source Forge in the same project which hosts Numeric: http://sourceforge.net/projects/numpy/ The web page for Numarray information is at: http://stsdas.stsci.edu/numarray/index.html Trackers for Numarray Bugs, Feature Requests, Support, and Patches are at the Source Forge project for NumPy at: http://sourceforge.net/tracker/?group_id=1369 REQUIREMENTS ------------------------------ numarray-1.1 requires Python 2.2.2 or greater. AUTHORS, LICENSE ------------------------------ Numarray was written by Perry Greenfield, Rick White, Todd Miller, JC Hsu, Paul Barrett, Phil Hodge at the Space Telescope Science Institute. We'd like to acknowledge the assitance of Francesc Alted, Paul Dubois, Sebastian Haase, Tim Hochberg, Nadav Horesh, Edward C. Jones, Eric Jones, Jochen Kuepper, Travis Oliphant, Pearu Peterson, Peter Verveer, Colin Williams, and everyone else who has contributed with comments and feedback. Numarray is made available under a BSD-style License. See LICENSE.txt in the source distribution for details. -- Todd Miller jmiller(a)stsci.edu

1 0