1) New policy for what can and cannot be converted during the Derby First, let me apologize for only figuring this out now. The Derby has been a learning process, discovering things that Argument Clinic didn't handle. And there were a lot of funny edge cases that we weren't going to discover until we tried doing the conversion. And to be honest I was pushing harder than I should have. *ahem* The new policy for conversion work for Python 3.4: We may only convert functions that have signatures that we can represent 100% accurately in an inspect.Signature object. IF the function has a default value that can't be represented in Python (e.g. NULL), but we can find a value in Python that behaves identically to not passing in that parameter (e.g. _sha1.sha1(b'') == _sha1.sha1()), then we may convert that function using that clever default value (e.g. "string: object(c_default='NULL') = b'' "). IF the function has parameters with default values that are dynamic or cannot be represented accurately in Python, it cannot be converted without changing its semantics. So it cannot be converted for 3.4. IF the function *requires* "optional groups" (as in, the original function used switch(PyTuple_GET_SIZE(args)) and multiple calls to PyArg_ParseTuple()), then it's permissible to convert it for 3.4, but they are low priority. Such functions have semantics that are so weird, we will have to modify inspect.Parameter to support them, and that will only happen in 3.5. However, I will ensure that they otherwise convert correctly for 3.4. (They won't actually generate signatures. They will however generate the first line of the docstring.) For 3.5, I expect we'll have more leeway in doing things like "this should accept an int or None". But we should talk about that then. If you have patches outstanding that convert functions that shouldn't be converted for 3.4, please put them aside. We can almost certainly use them for 3.5. If any conversions have been committed that change the semantics of the function, someone will have to back them out. I'd appreciate it if the person who checked it in could do it. I expect to make a pass before rc1 to check all the conversions myself. (Which I hope will be quite time-consuming, as hopefully there will be lots of converted functions by then!) _______________________________________________________________________________ 2) New recommendation for marking to-do functions If you examine a function and determine that it can't be converted to Argument Clinic right now, please add a comment to that effect. The comment should be one line, and contain a special marker so we can find it easily with searches. I nominate two different markers: "AC 3.4" means "It's okay to convert this function to Argument Clinic in 3.4, but it can't be converted right now because of a bug or missing feature in Argument Clinic." "AC 3.5" means "This function can't be converted to Argument Clinic in 3.4, it must wait for 3.5." I encourage you to add a little text saying why, like: /* AC 3.4: waiting for *args support */ /* AC 3.5: value parameter has default value of NULL */ _______________________________________________________________________________ Finally, I've realized that right now there's no good way to stay abreast of what's new and changing in clinic.py. I check in a patch just about every day for clinic.py, and sometimes I don't remember to update the "howto". The best way unfortunately is to read the output of "hg log". If you have questions, you can email me directly at "larry at hastings dot org", or you can find me in the #python-dev IRC channel. Thank you, everybody who's participating in the Derby, and again I'm sorry I didn't realize sooner this *had* to be the policy for 3.4. Hope to see your issues in the tracker, /arry