The Python 2.3 release schedule as laid out in PEP 283 is unrealistic. It has May 22 (yesterday) as the release date for 2.3a1, and then promises successive releases at approximately 4-week intervals. I think we're nowhere near doing the first alpha release. PythonLabs has been consumed by high priority Zope projects. There's a little less pressure now, and we can go back to thinking about Python releases, but we've lost a lot of time. We haven't even appointed a release manager! (Or the appointment was never recorded in the PEP.) In the discussion about release stability, it was brought up that the release schedule should be driven by feature completeness, not by the calendar. I basically agree, although I believe that when it takes the responsible party for a particular feature forever to implement it, it's better to move the feature to future release than to hold up the release forever. So let's discuss features for 2.3. PEP 283 mentions these:
PEP 266 Optimizing Global Variable/Attribute Access Montanaro PEP 267 Optimized Access to Module Namespaces Hylton PEP 280 Optimizing access to globals van Rossum
(These are basically three friendly competing proposals.) Jeremy has made a little progress with a new compiler, but it's going slow and the compiler is only the first step. Maybe we'll be able to refactor the compiler in this release. I'm tempted to say we won't hold our breath for this one.
PEP 269 Pgen Module for Python Riehl
I haven't heard from Jon Riehl, so I consider dropping this idea.
PEP 273 Import Modules from Zip Archives Ahlstrom
I think this is close -- maybe it's already checked in and I don't know about it!
PEP 282 A Logging System Mick
Vinay Sajip has been making steady progress on an implementation, and despite a recent near-flamewar (which I haven't followed) I expect that his code will be incorporated in the near future. That's it as far as what PEP 283 mentions (there's also a bunch of things already implemented, like bool, PyMalloc, universal newlines). Here are some ideas of my own for things I expect to see in 2.3a1: - Provide alternatives for common uses of the types module; essentially Skip's proto-PEP. - Extended slice notation for all built-in sequences. Wasn't Raymond Hettinger working on this? - Fix the buffer object??? http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2002-May/023896.html - Lazily tracking tuples? Neil, how's that coming? http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2002-May/023926.html - Timeoutsocket. Work in progress. http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2002-May/024077.html - Making None a keyword. Can't be done right away, but a warning would be a first step. http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2002-April/023600.html - Stage 2 of the int/long integration (PEP 237). This mostly means warning about situations where hex, oct or shift of an int returns a different value than for the same value as a long. (I think the PEP misses this step, but it's necessary -- we can't just change the semantics silently without warning first.) - I think Andrew Kuchling has a bunch of distutils features planned; how's that coming? - PEP 286??? (MvL: Enhanced argument tuples.) I haven't had the time to review this thoroughly. It seems a deep optimization hack (also makes better correctness guarantees though). - A standard datetime type. An implementation effort is under way: http://www.zope.org/Members/fdrake/DateTimeWiki/FrontPage Effbot and MAL have a proposal for a basic interface that all datetime types should implement, but there are some problems with UTC. A decision needs to be made. Anything else? --Guido van Rossum (home page: http://www.python.org/~guido/)