Mailman 3 August 2008 - Python-announce-list

TextTest 3.12 released!
by Geoff Bache 18 Aug '08

18 Aug '08

Dear all, This is an announcement for a tool that has existed since 2003 but whose releases haven't featured on this list before. For users it isn't strictly python-specific as it will test programs written in any language, but it is written in Python and also functions as an extensible python framework for functional testing. So I'm going to announce releases here in future unless anyone objects... Its position is that it is entirely free, entirely open source (LGPL) but also has corporate funding behind it (from Jeppesen) so it's a less risky investment than some open source tools. For anyone that already knows the tool, release 3.12 includes major improvements to both initial creation of application config files, and the functionality to reconnect to previous runs. There is a completely new information window for test runs that provides an overview of exactly what has been run. There is also a new plugin for Bugzilla version 3. On Windows, you now need at least Python 2.5.1. The tests for itself will now run out of the box with no setup. There are many more minor enhancements and bug fixes. Regards, Geoff Bache About (See http://www.texttest.org for more details): ===== TextTest is a tool for automatic text-based functional testing. This means running a batch-mode executable in lots of different ways from the command line, and using the contents of produced text files as a means of controlling the behaviour of that application. It is written in Python using PyGTK for its user interfaces, and is supported on POSIX-based systems and Windows (2000,XP,Vista). Features include: - Filters output to avoid false failure - Manages test data and isolation from global effects - Automatic organisation and grouping of test failures - “Nightjob website” to get a view of test progress over time - Performance testing - Integrates with Sun Grid Engine for parallel testing (and LSF) - Various “data mining” tools for automatic log interpretation (includes integration with bug trackers) - Interception techniques to automatically “mock out” third-party components (command line and network traffic). - Integrates with xUseCase tools for GUI testing

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Python-URL! - weekly Python news and links (Aug 18)
by Gabriel Genellina 18 Aug '08

18 Aug '08

QOTW: "COMP.LANG.PYTHON. We're so efficent, we deliver the answer before you can ask the question." - Travis Beaty http://groups.google.com/group/comp.lang.python/msg/0a976f29ec9f43e0 Named tuples, exec, closures, and why the old taxonomy of languages is no more relevant: http://groups.google.com/group/comp.lang.python/browse_thread/thread/988b29… Some ideas to process a fixed-width text file: http://groups.google.com/group/comp.lang.python/browse_thread/thread/512974… Redirecting standard output from a C library using ctypes: http://groups.google.com/group/comp.lang.python/browse_thread/thread/92dfd4… A program that hit the limits: 20 nested for statements or 100 indentation levels! http://groups.google.com/group/comp.lang.python/browse_thread/thread/1b4230… Comparing different methods for replacing several strings: http://groups.google.com/group/comp.lang.python/browse_thread/thread/a1903b… type, object, and their incestuous relationship: http://groups.google.com/group/comp.lang.python/browse_thread/thread/251bf0… Nested classes and scoping rules: http://groups.google.com/group/comp.lang.python/browse_thread/thread/42d804… Bruno Desthuilliers analyses the performance penalty of using __getattr__/__setattr__ instead of properties: http://groups.google.com/group/comp.lang.python/browse_thread/thread/a99ff1… Why is Ruby+Rails getting more attention than Python these days? http://groups.google.com/group/comp.lang.python/browse_thread/thread/cec5d7… ======================================================================== 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 Just beginning with Python? This page is a great place to start: http://wiki.python.org/moin/BeginnersGuide/Programmers The Python Papers aims to publish "the efforts of Python enthusiats": http://pythonpapers.org/ The Python Magazine is a technical monthly devoted to Python: http://pythonmagazine.com Readers have recommended the "Planet" sites: http://planetpython.org http://planet.python.org comp.lang.python.announce announces new Python software. Be sure to scan this newsgroup weekly. http://groups.google.com/group/comp.lang.python.announce/topics Python411 indexes "podcasts ... to help people learn Python ..." Updates appear more-than-weekly: http://www.awaretek.com/python/index.html 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/ 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/donations/ The Summary of Python Tracker Issues is an automatically generated report summarizing new bugs, closed ones, and patch submissions. http://search.gmane.org/?author=status%40bugs.python.org&group=gmane.comp.p… Although unmaintained since 2002, the Cetus collection of Python hyperlinks retains a few gems. 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://code.activestate.com/recipes/langs/python/ Many Python conferences around the world are in preparation. Watch this space for links to them. Among several Python-oriented RSS/RDF feeds available, see: http://www.python.org/channews.rdf 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://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0042/ del.icio.us presents an intriguing approach to reference commentary. It already aggregates quite a bit of Python intelligence. http://del.icio.us/tag/python *Py: the Journal of the Python Language* http://www.pyzine.com Dr.Dobb's Portal is another source of Python news and articles: http://www.ddj.com/TechSearch/searchResults.jhtml?queryText=python and Python articles regularly appear at IBM DeveloperWorks: http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/search/searchResults.jsp?searchSite=dW&se… Previous - (U)se the (R)esource, (L)uke! - messages are listed here: http://search.gmane.org/?query=python+URL+weekly+news+links&group=gmane.com… http://groups.google.com/groups/search?q=Python-URL!+group%3Acomp.lang.pyth… http://lwn.net/Search/DoSearch?words=python-url&ctype3=yes&cat_25=yes There is *not* an RSS for "Python-URL!"--at least not yet. Arguments for and against are occasionally entertained. 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!". Write to the same address to unsubscribe. -- The Python-URL! Team-- Phaseit, Inc. (http://phaseit.net) is pleased to participate in and sponsor the "Python-URL!" project. Watch this space for upcoming news about posting archives.

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bbfreeze 0.96.3
by Ralf Schmitt 18 Aug '08

18 Aug '08

Hi all, I uploaded bbfreeze 0.96.3 to python's cheeseshop. bbfreeze creates standalone executables from python scripts (similar to py2exe). bbfreeze works on windows and unix-like operating systems (no OS X unfortunately). bbfreeze is able to freeze multiple scripts, handle egg files and track binary dependencies. This release fixes an issue with some packages wrongly being recognized as "development eggs". More information can be found in the package index: http://cheeseshop.python.org/pypi/ bbfreeze/ The development repository (mercurial) can be found here: http://systemexit.de/repo/bbfreeze I've also setup a google group for discussion: It's homepage is http://groups.google.com/group/bbfreeze-users. You can subscribe by sending email to bbfreeze-users-subscribe(a)googlegroups.com or ask questions by sending email to bbfreeze-users(a)googlegroups.com Regards, - Ralf

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Lepton particle engine 0.6a released
by Casey Duncan 17 Aug '08

17 Aug '08

I'm pleased to announce the 0.6 alpha release of Lepton, a high-performance, pluggable particle engine and API for Python. Although it is still under development, a critical mass of features are completed and I think it is ready for wider consumption. Note that this is an alpha release, so expect the API to change somewhat in future releases. New features are also under development. The engine is designed to be very flexible and does not rely on any other libraries directly. You can use it either with OpenGL (via pyglet or PyOpenGL), or with pygame by selecting the appropriate renderer. Examples are provided using pyglet and pygame. The project page is here: http://code.google.com/p/py-lepton/ You can also get it via pypi here: http://pypi.python.org/pypi/lepton/ One of the missing pieces right now is a native binary installer for Windows. It can be compiled using cygwin or MinGW, but we could use some help getting it working with MSVC. If anyone would like to contribute their Visual Studio expertise, it would be greatly appreciated. If you have questions or comments or would like to contribute, you can join our google group at: http://groups.google.com/group/py-lepton-users Enjoy. -Casey

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[ANN] Release 0.70.3 of Task Coach
by Frank Niessink 17 Aug '08

17 Aug '08

Hi, I'm happy to announce release 0.70.3 of Task Coach. This release fixes a few bugs introduced in the previous release. Bugs fixed: * wxPython 2.8.8.1 generates images in a new, backwards incompatible way, even when told not to do that. This bug affects users that have an older version of wxPython installed and use one of the Linux packages. Fixed by adding the relevant pieces from wxPython 2.8.8.1 to the Task Coach sources. * Opening a new task viewer didn't work. * Closing effort viewers causes exceptions. What is Task Coach? Task Coach is a simple task manager that allows for hierarchical tasks, i.e. tasks in tasks. Task Coach is open source (GPL) and is developed using Python and wxPython. You can download Task Coach from: http://www.taskcoach.org In addition to the source distribution, packaged distributions are available for Windows XP/Vista, Mac OS X, and Linux (Debian and RPM format). Note that Task Coach is alpha software, meaning that it is wise to back up your task file regularly, and especially when upgrading to a new release. Cheers, Frank

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TaskCoach: first SyncML release candidate
by Jerome Laheurte 17 Aug '08

17 Aug '08

This is a preliminary release for testing purposes. It features synchronization of tasks and notes with a Funambol server, so indirectly with any application supporting SyncML, either natively or through a plugin (Outlook, most recent cell phones, iPods, etc). As the package name hints, this is highly experimental, so please backup your files before trying it. You can download this release from the SourceForge download page: http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=130831&package_id=183… What is Task Coach? Task Coach is a simple task manager that allows for hierarchical tasks, i.e. tasks in tasks. Task Coach is open source (GPL) and is developed using Python and wxPython. You can download Task Coach from: http://www.taskcoach.org In addition to the source distribution, packaged distributions are available for Windows XP/Vista, Mac OS X, and Linux (Debian and RPM format). Note that Task Coach is alpha software, meaning that it is wise to backup your task file regularly, and especially when upgrading to a new release.

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ETS 3.0.0 released!
by Dave Peterson 16 Aug '08

16 Aug '08

Hello, I'm pleased to announce that ETS 3.0.0 has just been tagged and released! Source distributions have been pushed to PyPi and over the next couple hours, Win32 and OSX binaries will also be uploaded to PyPi. This means you can install ETS, assuming you have the prereq software installed, via the simple command: easy_install ETS[nonets] Please see the Install page on our wiki for more detailed installation instructions: https://svn.enthought.com/enthought/wiki/Install Developers of ETS will find that the projects' trunks have already been bumped up to the next version numbers so a simple "ets up" (or svn up) should bring you up to date. Others may wish to grab a complete new checkout via a "ets co ETS". The release branches that had been created are now removed. The next release is currently expected to be ETS 3.0.1 -- Dave Enthought Tool Suite --------------------------- The Enthought Tool Suite (ETS) is a collection of components developed by Enthought and open source participants, which we use every day to construct custom scientific applications. It includes a wide variety of components, including: * an extensible application framework * application building blocks * 2-D and 3-D graphics libraries * scientific and math libraries * developer tools The cornerstone on which these tools rest is the Traits package, which provides explicit type declarations in Python; its features include initialization, validation, delegation, notification, and visualization of typed attributes. More information is available for all the packages within ETS from the Enthought Tool Suite development home page at http://code.enthought.com/projects/tool-suite.php. Testimonials ---------------- "I set out to rebuild an application in one week that had been developed over the last seven years (in C by generations of post-docs). Pyface and Traits were my cornerstones and I knew nothing about Pyface or Wx. It has been a hectic week. But here ... sits in front of me a nice application that does most of what it should. I think this has been a huge success. ... Thanks to the tools Enthought built, and thanks to the friendly support from people on the [enthought-dev] list, I have been able to build what I think is the best application so far. I have built similar applications (controlling cameras for imaging Bose-Einstein condensate) in C+MFC, Matlab, and C+labWindows, each time it has taken me at least four times longer to get to a result I regard as inferior. So I just wanted to say a big "thank you". Thank you to Enthought for providing this great software open-source. Thank you for everybody on the list for your replies." — Gaël Varoquaux, Laboratoire Charles Fabry, Institut d’Optique, Palaiseau, France "I'm currently writing a realtime data acquisition/display application … I'm using Enthought Tool Suite and Traits, and Chaco for display. IMHO, I think that in five years ETS/Traits will be the most comonly used framework for scientific applications." — Gary Pajer, Department of Chemistry, Biochemistry and Physics, Rider University, Lawrenceville NJ

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HDF5 for Python 0.3.0
by Andrew Collette 15 Aug '08

15 Aug '08

======================================= Announcing HDF5 for Python (h5py) 0.3.0 ======================================= HDF5 for Python (h5py) is a general-purpose Python interface to the Hierarchical Data Format library, version 5. HDF5 is a versatile, mature scientific software library designed for the fast, flexible storage of enormous amounts of data. The h5py project has been under informal development for a few months now, and has reached the point where it might be generally useful to others. Unlike the fantastic PyTables project, h5py aims to provide access to the full HDF5 C library, although in a more Pythonic fashion. Almost all of the HDF5 1.6.X API is covered, with improvements like: - object-oriented identifiers with reference counting - automatic raising of Python exceptions for HDF5 errors - conversion between NumPy and HDF5 datatypes It also includes a set of high-level, pure-Python classes which represent basic HDF5 abstractions like files, groups, and datasets, using native Python and NumPy infrastructure. For example, datasets carry a shape tuple and dtype, and support partial I/O via the standard extended slicing syntax. The primary focus of the project is read/write interoperability with existing HDF5 data; using Python and the NumPy package, you can access data in HDF5 format, process it, and write files that any HDF5-aware program can understand. Automatic conversion is provided between NumPy and HDF5 datatypes; almost all NumPy types can be transparently converted to their HDF5 equivalents. This includes constructs like complex numbers in addition to arbitrarily nested compound ("recarray") data types. Resources ========= Python 2.5 and Numpy >= 1.0.3 are required. For UNIX, a C compiler is also required which can build Python extensions. HDF5 versions 1.6.5, 1.6.7, 1.8.0 and 1.8.1 are supported. The Windows installer includes HDF5 1.8.1. Source installers for UNIX and an integrated installer for Windows are available from the Google Code development page: http://h5py.googlecode.com Comprehensive documentation, including installation instructions and a quick-start guide, is available at: http://h5py.alfven.org You can read more about the HDF5 library at the HDF Group web site: http://www.hdfgroup.com/HDF5 *** This project is NOT affiliated with the HDF Group. *** All code for this project is released under the BSD license. Thanks ====== Thanks to D. Dale, D. Brooks, E. Lawrence for their comments and suggestions in development, and the PyTables project for general inspiration, along with "definitions.pxd". :) ---- Andrew Collette http://www.alfven.org Mail: "h5py" at the domain "alfven.org"

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ANN: Mercurial 1.0.2
by Martin Geisler 15 Aug '08

15 Aug '08

I would like to announce the release of Mercurial 1.0.2! Mercurial is a fast, lightweight Source Control Management system designed for efficient handling of very large distributed projects. It scales all the way from big projects like Xen, Mozilla and OpenJDK down to single-man projects. Downloaded at: http://www.selenic.com/mercurial/release/mercurial-1.0.2.tar.gz Homepage: http://www.selenic.com/mercurial/ Changes since Mercurial 1.0.1: Security: * ensure that git patches only touch files within the repository (CVE-2008-2942) * hgweb: fix "allowpull" permission being ignored when pulling from hgweb General: * commit: handle copies of previously deleted files * bisect: allow for having multiple resulting changesets * fix Python 2.3 compatibility * make mq patches and .hgtags hardlink-safe again * various documentation improvements and fixes * fix a crash when addremove was called to replace a deleted directory with a symlink * make branches output easier to parse (issue 1230) * fix inactive branches detection (issue 1104) * hgweb: fix a crash in archive when the URL did not end in an expected archive type * sshserver: fix a crash in error handling code * fix the patchbomb extension on Windows by including email package in binary installations * handle symlinks when OS supports them but FS doesn't (issue 1149) Full details here: http://www.selenic.com/mercurial/wiki/index.cgi/WhatsNew -- Martin Geisler

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ANN: Leo 4.5 beta 3 released
by Edward K Ream 15 Aug '08

15 Aug '08

Leo 4.5 beta 3 is now available at: http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=3458&package_id=29106 Leo 4.5 contains many important new features. See below for details. Leo is a text editor, data organizer, project manager and much more. See: http://webpages.charter.net/edreamleo/intro.html The highlights of Leo 4.5: -------------------------- - Full support for @shadow files in Leo's core. - Major improvements to Leo's key binding code. - The beginning of usable vim-like bindings. - uA's may now be associated with vnodes in @thin and @shadow files. - Several magor reorganizations of Leo's code: including sax-based parsing, support for the Graph world (unified nodes), simplified drawing code. - Leo is now an installable package. - Prepared code to be ready for Python 3.0. - Many small improvements and bug fixes. Links: ------ Leo: http://webpages.charter.net/edreamleo/front.html Forum: http://groups.google.com/group/leo-editor Download: http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=3458 Bzr: http://code.launchpad.net/leo-editor/ Quotes: http://webpages.charter.net/edreamleo/testimonials.html -------------------------------------------------------------------- Edward K. Ream email: edreamleo(a)yahoo.com Leo: http://webpages.charter.net/edreamleo/front.html --------------------------------------------------------------------

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