[Python-Dev] 2.0 articles

[Andrew Kuchling]

Before we all become focused on new features for Python 2.1, it would
be nice to do a bit more work on raising awareness of the new features
in 2.0.  There's little point in developing software if you don't
actually tell anyone about it, after all.

I'd like to suggest that people try to write some brief articles, just
a few pages long, each covering a particular feature in some detail.

Looking through the list of new stuff, the most significant features are:

* Unicode support.  (Perl's UTF-8 support still seems incomplete, with
  developers referring to it as "unusable", so we should definitely try and
  point out that we have working Unicode support right now.)

* Distutils: an introduction to writing setup scripts for simple
  Python modules, packages, and C extensions.

* The new XML tools.

* The new gettext support.

* Maybe the linuxaudiodev module, too.

Any other suggestions?

If the story of how a particular feature was implemented is
interesting, then that would also make a fine topic for a more
developer-oriented publication such as DDJ.  SRE or Unicode may be the
best candidates for this sort of thing, as their implementation
presented various tricky technical problems along the way.

Any volunteers?

--amk