Mailman 3 March 2010 - Python-Dev

Fraction arithmetic (Was: Decimal ... float comparisons in py3k)
by Paul Moore 20 Mar '10

20 Mar '10

On 20 March 2010 04:20, Nick Coghlan <ncoghlan(a)gmail.com> wrote: > In the case of floats and Decimals, there's no ambiguity here that > creates any temptation to guess - to determine a true/false result for a > comparison, floats can be converted explicitly to Decimals without any > loss of accuracy. For Fractions, the precedent has already been set by > allowing implicit (potentially lossy) conversion to binary floats - a > lossy conversion to Decimal wouldn't be any worse. Hmm, given that a float can be converted losslessly to a fraction, why was the decision taken to convert the fraction to a float rather than the other way round? I don't see a PEP for the fractions module, and my google-fu has failed to find anything. Was there a discussion on this? Paul.

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Tracker reviews workflow and flags
by anatoly techtonik 20 Mar '10

20 Mar '10

I want to push some of my patches before 2.7 and use 5-1 rule for that, but I can't come up with any review workflow other than mailing status of my comments to the issues here. I can't mark issues in any way. How about giving users ability to set flags or keywords? Maybe entering a separate field like "Review status"? Real world example with issue8151. It is an issue with a trivial patch in it. Everything what is needed is to dispatch it to stable `commit queue` and port to trunk. It is not 'easy' - it is 'trivial', but I have no means to mark it as 'easy' either, so even this trivial fix lies in tracker for three days waiting for review. About 'easy' flag: "6 easy This is an easy task (e.g. suitable for GHOP or bug day beginners)" It seems that it is for the issue that requires a patch, but if the patch is already there and nobody wants to commit it - what should I do? Finally, review queue proposal. To follow 5-1 rule, I need to review 5 issues, before mine is reviewed, so I need some help from tracker. 1. I lack expertise in certain areas (C/C++, Mac OS, etc.), so I would like to hide some issues under "Needs review" query, so they won't bother me (if too many people marked issues in this way - the stats may become a good reason for highly professional bug party) 2. I need ability to set "Needs review" flag back. Some issues were once reviewed, but since then they've got modified and need further comments. The need the review again. That means pushed back _into the end_ of patch queue. 3. Setting bug dependency by users. Often nobody wants to care about issue, because it is just too long, there is much irrelevant comments and nobody has time to read it. We don't have personal digg-like comment filters to cope with the amount of text to be brain-loaded. But it is possible to refactor such issue thread into separate digestable issue/issues. P.S. About personal comment filters if anybody is interested in that. Digg-like +1, -1 are good for voting, but for filtering it would be nice to: 1. have several filters for different aspects of the thread, 2. have JS filter by marking individual phrases in comments and adding ranges to filter using jquery / ajax This way reviews will be more fun and easy. -- anatoly t.

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Needs Review: 2to3 fixer for sys.exitfunc to atexit.
by Sean Reifschneider 20 Mar '10

20 Mar '10

Issue 2356 ( http://bugs.python.org/issue2356 ) looks like it has a patch candidate, but just needs review to put in place. Seems like it may be low hanging fruit critical that just needs a quick review to either apply or at least get back to the folks who are working on a patch. Thanks, Sean -- The most important thing in communication is to hear what isn't being said. -- Peter Drucker Sean Reifschneider, Member of Technical Staff <jafo(a)tummy.com> tummy.com, ltd. - Linux Consulting since 1995: Ask me about High Availability

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RELEASED Python 2.6.5
by Barry Warsaw 19 Mar '10

19 Mar '10

On behalf of the Python community, I'm happy to announce the availability of Python 2.6.5 final. This is the latest production-ready version in the Python 2.6 series. Python 2.6.5 fixes dozens of issues in the core, built-in modules, libraries, and documentation since Python 2.6.4 was released back in October 2009. We highly recommend that you upgrade to Python 2.6.5. Please see the NEWS file for all the gory details. http://www.python.org/download/releases/2.6.5/NEWS.txt Source tarballs and the Windows installers can be downloaded from the Python 2.6.5 page. The Mac OS X disk image will be uploaded soon. http://www.python.org/download/releases/2.6.5/ For more information on Python 2.6 in general, please see http://docs.python.org/whatsnew/2.6.html Please report bugs for any Python version in the Python tracker. http://bugs.python.org Enjoy, -Barry Barry Warsaw barry(a)python.org Python 2.6 Release Manager (on behalf of the entire python-dev team)

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"expected a character buffer object" messages
by aditya bhargava 19 Mar '10

19 Mar '10

I found an old thread on Python-Dev that suggested replacing the error "TypeError: expected a character buffer object" with something more helpful for non-experts like "expected a string or character buffer". Here's the thread: http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2006-May/065301.html I think this is an excellent idea, but besides this ticket: http://bugs.python.org/issue6780 I haven't seen anything further about it. Does anyone know the status on this? It would be nice to have a more descriptive error. Aditya -- wefoundland.com

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3.1.2 tagging delayed a little
by Benjamin Peterson 19 Mar '10

19 Mar '10

Pending the resolution of a few Mac OS issues (#8068, #8069, and #8133), I'm not going to tag the release at the moment. Hopefully, we'll still be able to have a release in the next week. -- Regards, Benjamin

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binary operation heuristics -- bug or undocumented?
by Alex A. Naanou 19 Mar '10

19 Mar '10

Hi, A friend of mine stumbled upon the following behavior: ---cut--- >>> class A(object): pass ... >>> class B(object): ... def __add__(self, other): ... print 'B: adding B and %s objects.' % other.__class__.__name__ ... >>> class C(object): ... def __radd__(self, other): ... print 'C: adding C and %s objects.' % other.__class__.__name__ ... >>> a, b, c = A(), B(), C() >>> b + c B: adding B and C objects. >>> a + c C: adding C and A objects. # so far, quite logical. now let's do this: >>> 1 + c C: adding C and int objects. --uncut-- My first expectation would be to get a TypeError here, as ints indeed have an __add__ method, and they do not know anything about C objects (obviously :) ). On second thought, giving client code priority to handle things has it's merits. The problem is that I found no mention of this behavior in the docs. P.S. tested in 2.5 through 3.0 and PyPy Thanks. -- Alex.

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Is Scala better than Python ???
by OMEGA RED 18 Mar '10

18 Mar '10

To All, I have done some more review of python and Scala and I am very impressed with both languages. However, it seems as though that Scala is far more able to support parallel processing than Python ?? Is this true ?? O.R.

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Re: [Python-Dev] test_bigmem and test_bigaddrspace broken
by Antoine Pitrou 17 Mar '10

17 Mar '10

Hello, Le mercredi 17 mars 2010 à 11:58 -0700, C. Titus Brown a écrit : > On Wed, Mar 17, 2010 at 06:54:33PM +0000, Antoine Pitrou wrote: > > The title says it all. test_bigmem and test_bigaddrspace are partly > > broken under py3k, and no buildbot ever tests that they run successfully. > > As an example, here is a test_bigmem run under a 16GB machine. It gets > > "killed" at some point, probably by the Linux kernel's OOM killer, > > although I instruct the test suite to only use a fraction of the > > available RAM. There are also a couple of failures: > > I can provide login access to a 24gb machine (Linux), if you or others are > interested. Sometimes it's running other stuff, but it's got lots of swap :) Thanks for the proposal. That wasn't really the point of my message, though :) As mentioned I have access to a 16GB machine which is able to run the tests. The problem is that nobody seems interested in maintaining these tests. As far as I can say, the initial committer is Thomas Wouters, and not much happened since then. It seems to me that big companies such as Google and Apple would be the primarily concerned ones by such scenarios, and willing to ensure they run fine. (by the way, even without swapping and in non-debug mode, the tests are quite long to run) Regards Antoine.

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Removing Windows 95-related code in posixmodule.c
by Tim Lesher 17 Mar '10

17 Mar '10

Now that Windows 9x is no longer supported (per PEP 11), would it be appropriate to replace the ANSI ("A") versions of Windows OS calls in posixmodule.c with their Unicode ("W") equivalents and remove the unicode_file_names() function that determines which version to call? There are a number of places in that module where we try to decide whether to call ANSI or UNICODE versions (because only the ANSI versions were fully supported on Windows 9x). This is still fine on Win32, where the ANSI versions are still supported for backwards compatibility, but it causes issues with Windows CE, which doesn't have the ANSI versions at all. I've been maintaining some fairly ugly patches to cope with this in my company's Python 2.5.x for CE build, and I'd love to drop them as we move to a post-2.6 version. Thanks! -- Tim Lesher <tlesher(a)gmail.com>

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