On 8/20/06, Barry Warsaw wrote:

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On Aug 20, 2006, at 11:24 AM, Guido van Rossum wrote:

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I wonder if it would make sense to focus in 2.6 on making porting of 2.6 code to 3.0 easier, rather than trying to introduce new features in 2.6. We've done releases without new language features before; notable 2.3 didn't add anything new (except making a few __future__ imports redundant) and concentrated on bugfixes, performance, and library additions.

+1, and there are other benefits to this approach too.

First, the pace of change appears to slow, which addresses another source of complaints. Because instead of a slew of new features every 18 months, we really see that slew only every three years, with a stabilizing and bug fixing release in between. Another benefit is that with a de-emphasis on new features, we can spend more time improving the library and documentation.

I think fixing tests and documentation would be a great thing to focus 2.6on. Not glamourous, I know, but it is needed. For tests, I hope to get some decorators and such written that will help classify tests. Also adding a function to denote what module is being tested would be good (to avoid the issue of a dependent import for testing failing and then everyone just thinking the test was skipped). Lastly, testing the C API using ctypes would be really good since it is not thorougly tested. As for the docs, they just need a thorough updating. As to whether we should come up with some other format for Py3K with better semantic information and that is easier to read is another question entirely. -Brett

"A.M. Kuchling" writes:

On Mon, Aug 21, 2006 at 12:24:54PM -0700, Brett Cannon wrote:

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As for the docs, they just need a thorough updating.

Michael Hudson was working on a new guide to extending/embedding Python. Incorporating that should be a goal for 2.6 (the document may still need to be finished -- I'm not sure what state it's in).

Oh my word, even I had nearly forgotten about that. I think the latest version is here: http://starship.python.net/crew/mwh/toext/ and source is here: http://codespeak.net/svn/user/mwh/toext/ It's certainly not even half-finished, and I'm not sure how much time or enthusiasm I'm likely to be able to find for it in the medium term. Cheers, mwh -- ZAPHOD: OK, so ten out of ten for style, but minus several million for good thinking, eh? -- The Hitch-Hikers Guide to the Galaxy, Episode 2

I'll keep this in mind -- with the caveat that Georg mentioned. For the next 96 hours I'm going to be severely limited in bandwidth due to the physical requirements of the sprint at Google. I'd appreciate not receiving too much email during this period... --Guido On 8/20/06, Talin wrote:

Guido van Rossum wrote:

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I've been thinking a bit about a focus for the 2.6 release.

We are now officially starting parallel development of 2.6 and 3.0. I really don't expect that we'll be able to merge the easily into the 3.0 branch much longer, so effectively 3.0 will be a fork of 2.5.

I wonder if it would make sense to focus in 2.6 on making porting of 2.6 code to 3.0 easier, rather than trying to introduce new features in 2.6. We've done releases without new language features before; notable 2.3 didn't add anything new (except making a few __future__ imports redundant) and concentrated on bugfixes, performance, and library additions.

I've been thinking about the transition to unicode strings, and I want to put forward a notion that might allow the transition to be done gradually instead of all at once.

The idea would be to temporarily introduce a new name for 8-bit strings - let's call it "ascii". An "ascii" object would be exactly the same as today's 8-bit strings.

The 'str' builtin symbol would be assigned to 'ascii' by default, but you could assign it to 'unicode' if you wanted to default to wide strings:

str = ascii # Selects 8-bit strings by default str = unicode # Selects unicode strings by default

In order to make the transition, what you would do is to temporarily undefine the 'str' symbol from the code base - in other words, remove 'str' from the builtin namespace, and then migrate all of the code -- replacing any library reference to 'str' with a reference to 'ascii' *or* updating that function to deal with unicode strings. Once you get all of the unit tests running again, you can re-introduce 'str', but now you know that since none of the libraries refer to 'str' directly, you can safely change its definition.

All of this could be done while retaining compatibility with existing 3rd party code - as long as 'str = ascii' is defined. So you turn it on to run your Python programs, and turn it off when you want to work on 3.0 migration.

The next step (which would not be backwards compatible) would be to gradually remove 'ascii' from the code base -- wherever that name occurs, it would be a signal that the function needs to be updated to use 'unicode' instead.

Finally, once the last occurance of 'ascii' is removed, the final step is to do a search and replace of all occurances of 'unicode' with 'str'.

I know this seems round-about, and is more work than doing it all in one shot. However, I know from past experience that the trickiest part of doing a pervasive change to a code base like this is just keeping track of what parts have been migrated and what parts have not. Many times in the past I've changed the definition of a ubiquitous type by temporarily renaming it, thus vacating the old name so that it can be defined anew, without conflict.

-- Talin _______________________________________________ Python-Dev mailing list Python-Dev@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-dev Unsubscribe: http://mail.python.org/mailman/options/python-dev/guido%40python.org

-- --Guido van Rossum (home page: http://www.python.org/~guido/)

On Mon, 21 Aug 2006 14:21:30 -0700, Josiah Carlson wrote:

Talin wrote: [snip]

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I've been thinking about the transition to unicode strings, and I want to put forward a notion that might allow the transition to be done gradually instead of all at once.

The idea would be to temporarily introduce a new name for 8-bit strings - let's call it "ascii". An "ascii" object would be exactly the same as today's 8-bit strings.

There are two parts to the unicode conversion; all literals are unicode, and we don't have strings anymore, we have bytes. Without offering the bytes object, then people can't really convert their code. String literals can be handled with the -U command line option (and perhaps having the interpreter do the str=unicode assignment during startup).

A third step would ease this transition significantly: a unicode_literals __future__ import.

Here's my suggestion: every feature, syntax, etc., that is slated for Py3k, let us release bit by bit in the 2.x series. That lets the 2.x series evolve into the 3.x series in a somewhat more natural way than the currently proposed *everything breaks*. If it takes 1, 2, 3, or 10 more releases in the 2.x series to get to all of the 3.x features, great. At least people will have a chance to convert, or at least write correct code for the future.

This really seems like the right idea. "Shoot the moon" upgrades are almost always worse than incremental upgrades. The incremental path is better for everyone involved. For developers of Python, it gets more people using and providing feedback on the new features being developed. For developers with Python, it keeps the scope of a particular upgrade more manageable, letting them developer focus on a much smaller set of changes to be made to their application. Jean-Paul