[Python-Dev] Rework nntlib?

[Steve Holden]

On 9/15/2010 10:02 AM, Jesse Noller wrote:
> 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.
> 
Well, consider my remarks in a historical rather than a critical
context. I have no beef with 3.0 having come out when it did, and see no
reason why 3.x shouldn't continue to yield lessons for all Python
implementers.

The question of when to declare 3.x the "official" release is
interesting. I am inclined to say "when there's at least one other
implementation at 3.2" - even if CPython is then at 3.3 or 3.4.

regards
 Steve

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