[Python-Dev] python-dev Summary for 2004-09-01 through 2004-09-15 [draft]

[Brett C.]

=====================
Summary Announcements
=====================
Python 2.4a3 has been released.  Go to http://www.python.org/2.4/ and give it 
twirl.

Sorry for this summary being so short, but school has started back up again so 
I am in the middle of suddenly having to switch back into homework mode after 
spending the summer just having a 9:00-17:00 job.

And since it is a new school year I am going to abuse this space and say that 
anyone in San Luis Obispo, including students, should join the `SLO Meetup`_ 
coming up on October 14.

.. _SLO Meetup: http://python.meetup.com/95/

=========
Summaries
=========
--------------------
Movement in PEP Land
--------------------
`PEP 334`_ (Simple Coroutines via SuspendIteration) came into existence.

`PEP 328`_ (Relative Imports) got some discussion on postponing making imports 
absolute instead of the relative/absolute semantics they have now.  As it 
stands it looks like the changeover might get pushed off.

`PEP 292`_ (Simpler String Substitutions) seems to finally be done and locked down.

`PEP 335`_ (Overloadable Boolean Operators) came into existence.

.. _PEP 334: http://www.python.org/peps/pep-0334.html
.. _PEP 328: http://www.python.org/peps/pep-0328.html
.. _PEP 292: http://www.python.org/peps/pep-0292.html
.. _PEP 335: http://www.python.org/peps/pep-0335.html

Contributing threads:
   - `PEP 334 - Simple Coroutines via SuspendIteration <>`__
   - `PEP 328 - Relative Imports <>`__
   - `Re: Alternative Implementation for PEP 292:Simple	String Substitutions <>`__
   - `ANN: PEP 335: Overloadable Boolean Operators <>`__

------------------------------------------------------
__str__, __unicode__, and how to have them play nicely
------------------------------------------------------
Did you know that __str__ methods are allowed to return Unicode objects?  Well, 
it turns out they can, but that str() (which calls PyObject_Str()) 
automatically tries to convert the value returned by __str__ into ASCII. 
Basically __str__ shouldn't return Unicode if you can help it and you should 
use __unicode__ instead and reserve __str__ to return str objects only.

Contributing threads:
   - `unicode and __str__ <>`__

----------------------
Backporting C APIs bad
----------------------
Somebody (*cough* Guido *cough*) asked if the datetime C API could be 
backported to 2.3 .  The argument was that the only person who would probably 
use it is the person who asked for it, the author of cx_Oracle.

Well, pretty much everyone spoke up against this.  The argument went that 
adding an API would just be bad since there would suddenly be a point in the 
2.3 releases where backwards compatibility was broken.  People brought up the 
point of 2.2 where in 2.2.1 booleans were added and how that has caused 
compatibility headaches for some people.

In the end the API was not backported.

Contributing threads:
   - `Re: [Python-checkins] python/dist/src/Modules threadmodule.c, 2.56, 
2.56.8.1 <>`__

----------------------------------------------------------------------
Got to love race conditions thanks to the filesystem and external apps
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Tim Peters found a race condition one can have on Windows if you have an app 
that uses the low-level hooks into the filesystem.  If you create a file, 
delete it, and then try to delete the directory the directory deletion will 
fail since the file is not deleted yet.  What can happen is an indexing program 
can still be indexing the file before the filesystem is allowed to delete it 
and thus the directory is not truly empty when the directory deletion is 
executed.  Fun stuff.

Contributing threads:
   - `Coernic Desktop Search versus shutil.rmtree <>`__

-------------------------------
Python 2.4a3 is out the door!!!
-------------------------------
Go to http://www.python.org/2.4/ , download it (using the bz2 version if 
possible so as to save on bandwidth), and run it against your code, run the 
test suite, put it on your head and sell yourself to an art gallery, etc.

Contributing threads:
   - `RELEASED Python 2.4, alpha 3 <>`__


----------------------------
Cleaning the Exception House
----------------------------
The idea of reorganizing the exceptions hierarchy came up again (see 
http://www.python.org/dev/summary/2004-08-01_2004-08-15.html#an-exception-is-an-exception-unless-it-doesn-t-inherit-from-exception 
for a previous discussion on this).  This time, the idea of separating the 
hierarchy into exceptions one would like to catch with a bare 'except' and 
those that you wouldn't was brought up.

The idea is that some exceptions, such as MemoryError, one does not want to 
catch in a blanket statement usually.  Chances of recovering from that kind of 
exception is low and should only be caught if you know what you are doing.  So 
tweaking the exception hierarchy so that exceptions that were not 
near-catastrophic could inherit from an exception class that people could catch 
so as to allow the proper exceptions to propagate to the top-level without issue.

Tim Peters even went as far as to suggest deprecating bare 'except' statements. 
  This would force people to be explicit about what they want to catch, whether 
it be all "safe" exceptions or *all* exceptions.

As it stands now no officially decision has been made for Python 3000 since 
that is about the only place this could happen.

Contributing threads:
   - `Dangerous exceptions <>`__

---------------------------------------------------------------
Making decorators not look like decorators to the outside world
---------------------------------------------------------------
Raymond Hettinger pointed out that a decorator does not, by default, look like 
the function that it is fiddling with (if that is the intent).  Since most 
decorators will most likely be a wrapper function some things need to be set in 
the wrapper in order not to mask things in the wrapped function (doc string, 
argument parameters, etc.).

So Raymond pointed out some things one can do.  This also led to the suggestion 
of having a common name used to store a reference back to the wrapped function. 
  There was also the mention that a decorator-oriented module in the stdlib 
will probably materialize in Python 2.5 .  For now, though, stick recipes 
either in the Python Cookbook or in the Python wiki at 
http://www.python.org/cgi-bin/moinmoin/PythonDecoratorLibrary .

Contributing threads:
   - `decorator support <>`__

===============
Skipped Threads
===============
- random.py still broken wrt. urandom
- random.py fixage
- Re: [Python-checkins] python/dist/src/Lib/test test_compiler.py, 1.5, 1.6 
test_decimal.py, 1.13, 1.14
- assert failure on obmalloc
- Re: [Python-checkins] python/dist/src/Modules socketmodule.c, 1.304, 1.305
- Install-on-first-use vs. optional extensions
- Console vs. GUI applications
- Adding status code constants to httplib
- PEP 292: method names
- PEP 265 - Sorting dicts by value
- httplib is not v6 compatible, is this going to be fixed?
- OT: Unicode history
- --with-tsc compile fails
- tempfile.TemporaryFile on Windows NT
- PyExc_UnicodeDecodeError
- urllib.urlopen() vs IDNs, percent-encoded hosts, ':'
- tabs in httplib.py and test_httplib.py
       There is now a vimrc file in the Misc directory that sets things up to 
follow PEPs 7 & 8
- strawman decision: @decorator won't change
- unicode inconsistency?