Dear pythoneers, I'm pleased to announce a major update of the RSFile I/O Library: version 2.1. RSFile provides drop-in replacements for the classes of the*io *module, and for the *open()* builtin. Its goal is to provide a cross-platform, reliable, and comprehensive synchronous file I/O API, with advanced features like fine-grained opening modes, shared/exclusive file record locking, thread-safety, cache synchronization, file descriptor inheritability, and handy stat getters (size, inode, times...). Possible use cases for this library: concurrently writing to logs without ending up with garbled data, manipulating sensitive data like disk-based databases, synchronizing heterogeneous producer/consumer processes when multiprocessing semaphores aren't an option... Unix users might particularly be interested by the workaround that this library provides, concerning the weird semantic of fcntl() locks (when any descriptor to a disk file is closed, the process loses ALL locks acquired on this file through any descriptor). RSFile has been tested with py2.7 and py3.3+, on Windows/Linux systems, and should theoretically work on other *nix systems and python implementations The technical documentation of RSFile includes a comprehensive description of concepts and gotchas encountered while developing this library, which could be useful to anyone interested in getting in touch with gory file I/O details. The implementation is currently pure-python, so if you need high performances, using standard python streams in parallel will remain necessary. /Why v2.1 and not v2.0 you ask ? Just some pypi constraints I wasn't aware of, that'll teach me not to erase a just-released version to add some cleanup commits to it.../ Downloads: https://pypi.python.org/pypi/RSFile/2.1 Documentation: http://rsfile.readthedocs.io/en/latest/ Repository: https://github.com/pakal/rsfile _CHANGELOG:_ * Switch from Mercurial to Git * Remove python2.6 support and its polyfills * Move backends and test suites inside rsfile package * Conform rsfile to the behaviour of latest "io" module and "open" builtin * Make rsfile work against py33, py34 and py35, by leveraging their stdlib test suites * Rename "win32" to "windows" everywhere (even pywin32 extensions actually handle x64 system) * Improve the I/O benchmark runner * Cache decorated methods to boost performances * Add support for the new "x" mode flag in rsopen() * Fix the corner case of uninitialized streams * Tweak the excessive verbosity of locking tests * Handle exceptions when closing raw streams (stream is marked as closed anyway) * Normalize the naming of backend modules * Fix bugs with __getattr__() lookup forwarding * Use C/N flags for file existence on opening (-/+ supported but deprecated) * Automatically compare the behaviour of all possible open modes, between stdlib/io and rsfile * Autogenerate equivalence matrix for file opening modes, using python-tabulate. * Switch from distutils to setuptools for setup.py * Add support for the new "opener" parameter of open() builtin * Strengthen tests around fileno/handle reuse and duplication * Fix bug regarding improper value of file "modification_time" on windows * Add implicit flush() before every sync() * Remove heavy star imports from pywin32 backend * Roughly test sync() parameters, via performance measurements * Rename file "uid()" to "unique_id()", to prevent confusion with "user id" (but an alias remains) * Fix nasty bug where file unique_id could be None in internal registries * Add lots of defensive assertions * Make FileTimes repr() more friendly * Add support for the wrapping of [non-blocking] pipes/fifos * Reject the opening of directories properly * Reorganize and cleanup sphinx docs * Improve docstrings of added/updated methods/attributes * Explain the file locking semantic better * Update and correct typos in the "I/O Overview" article * Document lots of corner cases: thread safety, reentrancy, sync parameters, file-share-delete semantic... * Remove the now obsolete "multi_syscall_lock" (thread-safe interface does better) * Integrate tests and doc building with Tox * Fix bug with windows/ctypes backend on python3.5 (OVERLAPPED structure was broken) * Add tests for the behaviour of streams after a fork() * Add optmizations for systems without fork (no need for multiprocessing locks then) * Normalize "__future__" imports and code formatting * Review and document the exception types used * Cleanup/DRY tons of obsolete TODOs and comments * Better document the CAVEATS of rsfile, regarding fcntl and interoperability with other I/O libs * Add standard files to the repository (readme, contributing, changelog etc.) * Integrate with Travis CI * Add some tweaks to mimick the more tolerant behaviour of python2.7 open(), regarding the mixing of str and unicode * Add script for aggregate coverage reporting * Strengthen tests of rsopen() usage errors regards, Pascal Chambon