[Python-Dev] Volunteer help with porting

[Steve Holden]

On 9/7/2010 11:37 AM, R. David Murray wrote:
> On Tue, 07 Sep 2010 18:34:49 +0400, Oleg Broytman <phd at phd.pp.ru> wrote:
>> On Tue, Sep 07, 2010 at 02:02:59PM -0000, exarkun at twistedmatrix.com wrote:
>>> On 01:33 pm, phd at phd.pp.ru wrote:
>>>>   As there is already Python 3.2 alpha, the core of Python has already
>>>> been ported
>>>
>>> How about the email package?
>>
>>    What about email? It is a core library, right? It has been ported AFAIK.
>> Or have I missed something?
> 
> Some bug reports, perhaps?
> 
> Email has been "ported" in the sense that all the existing tests pass
> under py3k.  It is not, however, fully functional:  it cannot handle
> input that contains binary data with the high bit set.  (To put it another
> way, the python3 email package currently handles only 7bit clean data.)
> This has various unfortunate consequences for other standard library
> packages (cgi, nntp, etc) that depend directly or indirectly on the
> email package.
> 
> To fix this the email package API and a chunk of the internals needs
> to be redesigned so that it can handle bytes while still providing a
> string-based interface to the textual data.  This is no small task,
> since email in python2 has been getting away with all kinds of dirty
> tricks because of the lack of a clean bytes/string separation in python2.
> 
> See http://launchpad.net/python-email6 for current status of the project.
> 
> Prashant Kumar, if you would like to help with the email6 project, please
> sign up to the email-sig mailing list and introduce yourself there.
> All help is welcome!  It is not a "porting" project strictly
> speaking, but it certainly is interesting :)
> 
And if anyone knows people who would help with *funding* this effort the
PSF very much wants to talk to them. This ought logically to include
everyone using "Mailman". I would imagine if we had $10 from 1% of its
users we would be able to fund the effort comfortably.

regards
 Steve
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