Guido van Rossum :

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CML2 has been officially accepted for inclusion in the Linux kernel, BTW.

Congratulations are in order, Eric!

It wouldn't have happened without your signoff on including the curses module and friends in the 2.0 standard libraries. Eric's clever plan, if you haven't guessed already, was to use Python and the Linux kernel tree to goose the evolution of both projects, using the requirements from each one to overcome the resistance of the more conservative people in the other camp. And, while the major reason I made Python 2.x a prerequisite for CML2 was to shrink its footprint in the kernel tree, it was not absent from my mind that doing so would put salutary pressure on the Linux distros to upgrade to 2.x sooner than they might have otherwise.

I guess a more positive endorsement of Python from Linus will be out of the question for now... :-)

For now. But...the *next* step in the sinister master plan, after CML2 is in, involves replacing all the Perl and awk and Tcl in the kernel tree with Python. The conservatives on lkml who objected to adding Python to the build-prerequisites list are going to find that their own arguments for mimimal external dependencies actually support this move. OK, so I'm going to rewrite all the (non-bash) kernel support scripts. In the process, I'm going to make that codebase cleaner, smaller, better documented, and more featureful. Give me six months after CML2 goes in and I *will* have Linus and the lkml crowd making approving noises about Python. Count on it. At that point, we'll have seized a major piece of the high ground, with knock-on effects on Python's acceptance level everywhere. Which was *also* part of the plan, exactly dual to the effect on Linux of making kernel configuration so easy your Aunt Tillie could do it. There is one implication of this scenario for Python development itself -- that it's time to take a serious swing at eliminating our dependency on Tcl for GUIs. Whether we do this by adding wxPython to the core or in some other way I don't care, but it would strengthen my hand with the lkml crowd considerably if Python no longer had that dependency. Sometime in there, you and I gotta find time to PEP the Python library reorg, too... -- <a href="http://www.tuxedo.org/~esr/">Eric S. Raymond</a> The danger (where there is any) from armed citizens, is only to the *government*, not to *society*; and as long as they have nothing to revenge in the government (which they cannot have while it is in their own hands) there are many advantages in their being accustomed to the use of arms, and no possible disadvantage. -- Joel Barlow, "Advice to the Privileged Orders", 1792-93

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"ESR" == Eric S Raymond writes:

ESR> Guido van Rossum :

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- Eric Raymond extended the pstats module with a simple interactive statistics browser, invoked when the module is run as a script.

ESR> ...which I tested by using it to speed-tune the crap out of ESR> CML2, dropping the configurator's startup time from over 15 ESR> seconds to about 2 :-). Please take a look at the bug report I filed on SF. The ProfileBrowser seems to have a lot of bugs. The first several times I tried it, it crashed with uncaught exceptions. As an example, the strip command tries to call a strip_order() method, which isn't defined anywhere in the module. Perhaps there should be a test suite for the code. Otherwise, it's hard to tell if it works, since it was checked in the day of the release candidate. Jeremy

Eric S. Raymond :

Jeremy Hylton :

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Please take a look at the bug report I filed on SF.

I'll do so.

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Perhaps there should be a test suite for the code. Otherwise, it's hard to tell if it works, since it was checked in the day of the release candidate.

It was working enough for me to get practical use out of it, anway.

Trust Jeremy to find one of the only two methods I forgot to test after refactoring the browser to use the self.generic method. Should now be fixed in CVS; I have to go fight a different fire now, but I'll double-check all the methods this afternoon. -- <a href="http://www.tuxedo.org/~esr/">Eric S. Raymond</a> "Among the many misdeeds of British rule in India, history will look upon the Act depriving a whole nation of arms as the blackest." -- Mohandas Ghandhi, An Autobiography, pg 446