Hello everyone, I'm presently pleased to announce the first release of the "rsfile" package, in its alpha1 stage. Whatszepoint ? will you ask. Libraries to access files, we already have quite a bunch of them, without counting the new io modules of the stdlib! And that's precisely where rsfile fits: it's a partial reimplementation of the io module, as backward compatible as possible, and which offers a set of new - and possibly very useful - features. Ever dreamed of cross-platform, reliable and easy file locking, disk synchronization, stream inheritance management, size() and uid() getters, O_SYNC or (O_CREAT|O_EXCL) semantics ? Thanks to thin wrappers to native APIs, rsfile might spare you a some headaches, as it offers such things in an object-oriented and portable fashion, with the backup of a rather comprehensive test suite (which currently passes on win32/linux/freebsd - I'm still building more virtual machines to track platform-specific gotchas). Power users might be afraid by the fact that rsfile is currently a pure-python package, far slower than the latest C implementation of the io module. But patience, focus is currently set on semantic and robustness, cython extensions and other optimizations will come later on. B-) Since the primary goal of this alpha is to finalize the API, you're highly invited to browse the doc below, and to send feedback on method names, advanced mode flags, wished functionalities etc. http://bytebucket.org/pchambon/python-rock-solid-tools/wiki/index.html For those eager to play with new streams (and why not, run the test suite on their exotic OS and send me potential error outputs), here is the repository: http://bitbucket.org/pchambon/python-rock-solid-tools/downloads/ Enjoy, regards, Pascal (aka pythoniks) PS : for those who have already encountered the ugly flaws of fcntl() locks, I must precise that rsfile solves them almost entirely, at least if you make it your default file access gateway.