[Python-Dev] (Not) delaying the 3.2 release

[Brett Cannon]

On Thu, Sep 16, 2010 at 06:28, Nick Coghlan <ncoghlan at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Thu, Sep 16, 2010 at 10:26 PM, Antoine Pitrou <solipsis at pitrou.net> wrote:
>> Why won't you feel confident? Are there any specific issues (apart from
>> the lack of a WSGI PEP)?
>> If they are technical problems, they should be reported on the bug
>> tracker.
>> If they are representational, cultural or psychological issues, I'm
>> not sure what we can do. But delaying the release won't solve them.
>
> There are some APIs that should be able to handle bytes *or* strings,
> but the current use of string literals in their implementation means
> that bytes don't work. This turns out to be a PITA for some networking
> related code which really wants to be working with raw bytes (e.g.
> URLs coming off the wire).
>
> For example:
>
>>>> import urllib.parse as parse
>>>> parse.urlsplit("http://www.ubuntu.com")
> SplitResult(scheme='http', netloc='www.ubuntu.com', path='', query='',
> fragment='')
>>>> parse.urlsplit(b"http://www.ubuntu.com")
> Traceback (most recent call last):
>  File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module>
>  File "/home/ncoghlan/devel/py3k/Lib/urllib/parse.py", line 178, in urlsplit
>    i = url.find(':')
> TypeError: expected an object with the buffer interface
>
> There's no real reason urlsplit (and similar urllib.parse APIs)
> shouldn't support bytes, but the internal use of string literals
> currently prevents it.
>
> We don't seem to have created a tracker issue from the discussion back
> in June where this came up, so I went ahead and created one just now:
> http://bugs.python.org/issue9873

When I do my two months of PSF-sponsored core work (expected to be
Jan/Feb) I was planning on (finally) redoing the dev docs, writing a
HOWTO for maintaining a Python 2/3 code base, and cleaning up the test
suite. But I am starting to think I should change the last one to
solving this polymorphism problem in a way that can be applied across
the board in the stdlib.

>
> I think there were other APIs mentioned back then beyond the
> urllib.parse ones, but I didn't find them when I went trawling through
> the list archives yesterday. If anyone else thinks of any APIs that
> should allow bytes as well as strings (or vice-versa) feel free to add
> them to that issue.

Or create separate issues and make them dependencies for issue9873.