[Python-Dev] Rework nntlib?

[Antoine Pitrou]

On Mon, 13 Sep 2010 18:58:31 -0400
Barry Warsaw <barry at python.org> wrote:
> On Sep 14, 2010, at 11:28 AM, Michael Foord wrote:
> 
> >  On 14/09/2010 11:17, Antoine Pitrou wrote:
> >> Hello,
> >>
> >> Like the email package, nntplib in py3k is broken (because of
> >> various bytes/str mismatches; I suppose the lack of a test suite
> >> didn't help when porting).
> >>
> >> I would like to take the opportunity to improve the API a bit; no
> >> heavy re-architecting, but simply a bunch of changes to make it
> >> higher-level. Is it acceptable?
> >>
> >> (and, yes, I would add a test suite)
> >>
> >
> >Given that backwards incompatible changes are likely to be unavoidable
> >due to the bytes / str issue, taking the opportunity to cleanup and
> >improve the API sounds great. Just a shame we didn't get to it for
> >3.0, but thank you for picking this up.
> 
> A side benefit may be that Antoine finds some clever, useful, and more
> generally applicable techniques for dealing with byte/strings in these
> contexts. 

Well... One clever, useful and generally applicable technique I'm
currently using is "surrogateescape" combined with RFC 3977's
standardization on UTF-8 for non-message data.
(thanks Martin!)

But I don't think nntplib should implement any message parsing or
decoding. Users will have to rely on the email module (or their own
code) instead.

Regards

Antoine.