[Python-Dev] Towards 1.6 Final

[Barry A. Warsaw]

Okay, let me just preface this by saying none of the following has
been blessed by Guido in any way.  I'm sure he's still getting nice
and tan and drinking exotic tropical alcohol-based beverages, and not
thinking about Python one little bit. :)

Fred and Jeremy and I had a meeting today and thought about a schedule
/we'd/ like to see for Python 1.6 final.  This may or may not be
feasible but I throw it out here for discussion anyway.

The O'Reilly Open Source conference[1] starts July 17th and it would
be a nice target to release 1.6 final on the 14th, the Friday before
the conference.  We all plan on being there.n

What do we need to do to hit this target?  If we figure a 2 week beta
cycle, 1.6beta1 would have to be released June 30, with probably the
last alpha on June 23.  This is a tight schedule; is it even
feasible?.  Looking at Andrew's TODO list[2], here's what we came up
with:

- import hooks revamped (push this to 1.7)
- update docos to match 1.6 changes (Fred is going to integrate what's
  sitting in his inbox)
- document more undocumented modules (codes - done; unicodedata -
  needs work; mmap & pyexpat - Fred to integrate; curses - needs
  updates; regrtest - push to 1.7, see below)
- Unicode: Compress the size of unicodedatabase (waiting for Chris
  Tismer patches?)
- Unicode: Write \N{SMILEY} codec for Unicode (Bill Tutt has a patch,
  but none of us know what the state of this is -- is it crucial
  anyway?).
- Unicode: the various XXX items in Misc/unicode.txt (we didn't
  actually find such outstanding issues in this file).
- Delete obsolete subdirs in Demo/ directory (done)
- Refurbish Demo subdirs to be properly documented, match modern
  coding style, etc. (???)
- Fix ./ld_so_aix installation problem on AIX (anybody know more about
  this???)
- Make test/regrtest.py more usable outside of the Python test suite &
  document it.  (push to 1.7)
- Conservative GC, of cycles (this is basically done but needs a lot
  more testing)
- Changes to PyExpat module (Fred says this is done)
- Test the hell out of SRE.  (waiting for /F's complete implementation)
- enable threads by default if OS supports it
- integrate intl/gettext module
- clear the patches and bugs backlog

As we saw it the most critical things that need to get done are
testing the GC stuff and the SRE module.  Of those, the most critical
is SRE since AFAIK, we're still waiting for the final complete code
from /F.  I could be wrong about that.

The last three weren't on Andrew's list.  I'm on the hook for enabling
threads support by default and integrating intl/gettext.  I think
those will just be a couple of days work.

The final one requires Us to go through the outstanding bug and
patches lists and address the critical bugs.

Thoughts?  What have I missed?
-Barry

[1] http://conferences.oreilly.com/oscon2000/

[2] http://starship.python.net/crew/amk/python/1.6-jobs.html