Python-dev Summary, March 15 – 29, 2001

Date: Thu, 29 Mar 2001 13:06:00 +0100 (BST)
From: Michael Hudson mwh21@cam.ac.uk
To: python-announce-list@python.org
Subject: python-dev summary, 2001-03-15 – 2001-03-29

This is a summary of traffic on the python-dev mailing list
between Mar 15 and Mar 28 (inclusive) 2001. It is intended to
inform the wider Python community of ongoing developments. To
comment, just post to python-list@python.org or comp.lang.python in
the usual way. Give your posting a meaningful subject line, and if
it’s about a PEP, include the PEP number (e.g. Subject: PEP 201 –
Lockstep iteration) All python-dev members are interested in seeing
ideas discussed by the community, so don’t hesitate to take a
stance on a PEP if you have an opinion.

This is the fourth summary written by Michael Hudson. Summaries
are archived at:

http://starship.python.net/crew/mwh/summaries/

Posting distribution (with apologies to mbm)

Number of articles in summary: 410

Bug-fixing for 2.1 remained a priority for python-dev this
fortnight which saw the release of 2.1b2 last Friday.

* Python 2.0.1 *

Aahz posted his first draft of PEP 6, outlining the process by
which maintenance releases of Python should be made.

http://python.sourceforge.net/peps/pep-0006.html

Moshe Zadka has volunteered to be the “Patch Czar” for Python
2.0.1.

http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2001-March/013952.html

I’m sure we can all join in the thanks due to Moshe for taking
up this tedious but valuable job!

* Simple Generator implementations *

Neil Schemenauer posted links to a couple of “simple”
implementations of generators (a.k.a. resumable functions) that do
not depend on the stackless changes going in.

http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2001-March/013648.html

http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2001-March/013666.html

These implementations have the advantage that they might be
applicable to Jython, something that sadly cannot be said of
stackless.

* portable file-system stuff *

The longest thread of the summary period started off with a
request for a portable way to find out free disk space:

http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2001-March/013706.html

After a slightly acrimonious debate about the nature of Python
development, /F produced a patch that implements partial support
for os.statvfs on Windows:

http://sourceforge.net/tracker/index.php?func=detail&aid=410547&group_id=5470&atid=305470

which can be used to extract such information.

A side-product of this discussion was the observation that
although Python has a module that does some file manipulation,
shutil, it is far from being as portable as it might be – in
particular it fails miserably on the Mac where it ignores resource
forks. Greg Ward then pointed out that he had to implement
cross-platform file copying for the distutils

http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2001-March/013962.html

so perhaps all that needs to be done is for this stuff to be
moved into the core. It seems very unlikely there will be much
movement here before 2.2.