[Python-Dev] Python 2.0 beta 2 pre-release

[Tim Peters]

[Victor the Cleaner]
> Sorry, this wasn't intended to be bug report (not yet, at least).
> Jeremy asked for feedback on the release, and that's all I was trying
> to give.

Tommy B, is that you, hiding behind a Victor mask?  Cool!  I was really
directing my rancor at Jeremy <wink>:  by the time he fwd'ed the msg here,
it was already too late to change the release, so it had already switched
from "feedback" to "bug".

[MAL]
> It is fixed in CVS ... don't know if the patch made it into
> the release though. The new test now uses UTF-8 as encoding
> which is endian-independent.

Alas, it was not in the release.  I didn't even know about it until after
the installers were all built and shipped.  Score another for last-second
improvements <0.5 wink>.

Very, very weird:  we all know that SHA is believed to be cryptologically
secure, so there was no feasible way to deduce why the hashes were
different.  But I was coming down with a fever at the time (now in full
bloom, alas), and just stared at the two hashes:

    good:  b88684df19fca8c3d0ab31f040dd8de89f7836fe
    bad:   e052289ecef97fc89c794cf663cb74a64631d34e

Do you see the pattern?  Ha!  I did!  They both end with "e", and in my
fuzzy-headed state I immediately latched on to that and thought "hmm ... 'e'
is for 'endian'".  Else I wouldn't have had a clue!

should-get-sick-more-often-i-guess-ly y'rs  - tim