ANN - RockSolidTools' RSFile Advanced Streams v1.0a1

[Pascal Chambon]

Hello everyone,

I'm presently pleased to announce the first release
of the "rsfile" package, in its alpha1 stage.

Whatszepoint ? will you ask.
Libraries to access files, we already have quite a
bunch of them, without counting the new io modules
of the stdlib!

And that's precisely where rsfile fits: it's a partial
reimplementation of the io module, as backward compatible
as possible, and which offers a set of new - and possibly
very useful - features.

Ever dreamed of cross-platform, reliable and easy file
locking, disk synchronization, stream inheritance management,
size() and uid() getters, O_SYNC or (O_CREAT|O_EXCL)
semantics ?

Thanks to thin wrappers to native APIs, rsfile might spare you a
some headaches, as it offers such things in an object-oriented
and portable fashion, with the backup of a rather comprehensive
test suite (which currently passes on win32/linux/freebsd - I'm
still building more virtual machines to track platform-specific
gotchas).

Power users might be afraid by the fact that rsfile is currently
a pure-python package, far slower than the latest C implementation
of the io module. But patience, focus is currently set on semantic
and robustness, cython extensions and other optimizations will come
later on. B-)

Since the primary goal of this alpha is to finalize the API, you're 
highly invited
to browse the doc below, and to send feedback on method names, advanced
mode flags, wished functionalities etc.
http://bytebucket.org/pchambon/python-rock-solid-tools/wiki/index.html

For those eager to play with new streams (and why not, run the test
suite on their exotic OS and send me potential error outputs),
here is the repository:
http://bitbucket.org/pchambon/python-rock-solid-tools/downloads/

Enjoy,
regards,

Pascal (aka pythoniks)

PS : for those who have already encountered the ugly flaws of fcntl()
locks, I must precise that rsfile solves them almost entirely, at least 
if you
make it your default file access gateway.