[EuroPython] little BOFs again

Luke Kenneth Casson Leighton luke.leighton at gmail.com
Fri Jun 18 19:56:07 CEST 2010


On Fri, Jun 18, 2010 at 5:21 PM, Michael Foord <mfoord at python.org> wrote:
>>> One possibility would be to use PyPy, with its new C extension support,
>>> to
>>> get sandboxing.
>>>
>>
>>  intriguing idea.  what's the purpose - make it possible to run
>> python2.4 code on a modern system?
>>
>
> Python 2.4 still runs fine on all modern systems as far as I know.

 yes.

> My
> suggestion was to enable running Python applets in the browser without
> security problems. Python applets was part of the point of grail

 ahh.  right.  ok.  interesting.  ok, well the purpose i have in mind
for it is actually _as_ a platform-independent web browser, without
having to have a whopping 30mb download of c/c++ and having to also
compile python bindings to whatever web engine...

 basically i want access to W3C DOM functions (the ones that people
normally confuse as being solely and exclusively tied to javascript)
from python.

 but enough about that - the idea of getting grailbrowser
up-and-running again i think people would find insane/amusing enough
to try to get it going again.   searches for "grailbrowser" show loads
of people trying and failing to get it to work, so there is definitely
interest out there.

> and the
> rexec module in Python was created for this purpose; but rexec was
> hopelessly flawed (there were always ways to break out of the sandbox) and
> was deprecated.

 yes - i was disappointed about that when it happened: i had a project
which relied on it.

 rexec, regardless of the "breakage", actually had other benefits,
most notably demonstrated by overloading import to allow scripts to be
loaded out of sql databases rather than off the filesystem, on-demand.
 whether sandboxing was broken or not was completely irrelevant, as
far as the overriding / sub-classing of rexec was concerned.

 by adding in that exception "go to hell in a handbasket!" right at
the beginning of the rexec module i basically had to either take a
copy of rexec.py and remove that one line (and then maintain that
copy, forever), or can the project.

 l.


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