[Python-Dev] Rework nntlib?

[Jesse Noller]

On Tue, Sep 14, 2010 at 7:57 PM, Steve Holden <steve at holdenweb.com> wrote:
> On 9/14/2010 6:45 PM, R. David Murray wrote:
>> On Tue, 14 Sep 2010 16:34:33 +0530, Senthil Kumaran <orsenthil at gmail.com> wrote:
>>> On Tue, Sep 14, 2010 at 12:44:30PM +0200, Baptiste Carvello wrote:
>>>>>    Antoine> Like the email package, nntplib in py3k is broken (because of
>>>>>    Antoine> various bytes/str mismatches; I suppose the lack of a test
>>>>>    Antoine> suite didn't help when porting).
>>>>>
>>>>> How heavily used is nntp these days (unless you're looking for spam)?  Would
>>>>> it make more sense to find someone willing to maintain it outside the Python
>>>>> core and just remove it altogether?
>>>>>
>>>> Reading this from GMANE ;-)
>>>
>>> I guess, Skip's question or intention was, how often nntplib as a
>>> module is being used these days to write scripts/tools or clients?
>>> Very rarely.
>>>
>>> It would definitely be interesting to know, if there are python
>>> applications out there which are using nntplib at the moment.
>>
>> You all might find it interesting to know that I'm now maintaining
>> email and working on email6 as a direct consequence of nntplib.  I was
>> using it to read mailing lists through gmane, and when I tried to
>> port my nntp tool to Python3 I found that decode_header (among
>> other things) was broken, and as a consequence of talking to Barry
>> about that walked in to the email minefield....
>>
>> I'm currently not using my nttp reader, but it is because I couldn't
>> stand working on my client in Python2, I wanted to be using Python3.
>> So I volunteered to help with email...but I figure I'll come back around
>> and help Antoine with nttplib by and by :)
>>
> And again I say, if anyone knows of any budgets to which this work is
> important, the PSF will be happy to try and tap these people for money
> that can help the development effort. Frankly I am a little embarrassed
> by the poor quality of some library code.
>
> I think it shows that the "rush to release" which might not have been in
> Python's best short-term interests, even though actually getting it out
> the door was a significant occurrence for the long term..
>
> regards
>  Steve

Without the release we probably would not have found out about these
issues; no one seems to take the betas or alphas for serious test
drives (to be expected) with real code, so yeah, in hindsight, there
are issues - but then again, they would have been fixed if everyone
had really known about them in advance. No one wants to ship something
with horrible bugs in it.