Mailman 3 March 2000 - Python-Dev

Windows installer pre-prelease
by Guido van Rossum April 5, 2000

April 5, 2000

The Windows installer is always hard to get just right. If you have a moment, go to http://www.python.org/1.6/ and download the Windows Installer prerelease. Let me know what works, what doesn't! I've successfully installed it on Windows NT 4.0 and on Windows 98, both with default install target and with a modified install target. I'd love to hear that it also installs cleanly on Windows 95. Please test IDLE from the start menu! --Guido van Rossum (home page: http://www.python.org/~guido/)

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Heads up: socket.connect() breakage ahead
by Guido van Rossum April 4, 2000

April 4, 2000

Someone noticed that socket.connect() and a few related functions (connect_ex() and bind()) take either a single (host, port) tuple or two separate arguments, but that only the tuple is documented. Similar to append(), I'd like to close this gap, and I've made the necessary changes. This will probably break lots of code. Similar to append(), I'd like people to fix their code rather than whine -- two-arg connect() has never been documented, although it's found in much code (even the socket module test code :-( ). Similar to append(), I may revert the change if it is shown to cause too much pain during beta testing... --Guido van Rossum (home page: http://www.python.org/~guido/)

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Re: [Python-checkins] CVS: python/dist/src/Modules mmapmodule.c,2.1,2.2
by Barry A. Warsaw April 2, 2000

April 2, 2000

>>>>> "Guido" == Guido van Rossum <guido(a)cnri.reston.va.us> writes: Guido> Modified Files: mmapmodule.c Log Message: Hacked for Win32 Guido> by Mark Hammond. Reformatted for 8-space tabs and fitted Guido> into 80-char lines by GvR. Can we change the 8-space-tab rule for all new C code that goes in? I know that we can't practically change existing code right now, but for new C code, I propose we use no tab characters, and we use a 4-space block indentation. -Barry

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Re: [Python-checkins] CVS: python/dist/src/Misc ACKS,1.51,1.52
by Moshe Zadka April 1, 2000

April 1, 2000

On Fri, 31 Mar 2000, Guido van Rossum wrote: > + Christian Tismer > + Christian Tismer Ummmmm....I smell something fishy here. Are there two Christian Tismers? That would explain how Christian has so much time to work on Stackless. Well, between the both of them, Guido will have no chance but to put Stackless in the standard distribution. -- Moshe Zadka <mzadka(a)geocities.com>. http://www.oreilly.com/news/prescod_0300.html http://www.linux.org.il -- we put the penguin in .com

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Python 1.6 alpha 1 released
by Guido van Rossum April 1, 2000

April 1, 2000

I've just released a source tarball and a Windows installer for Python 1.6 alpha 1 to the Python website: http://www.python.org/1.6/ Probably the biggest news (if you hadn't heard the rumors) is Unicode support. More news on the above webpage. Note: this is an alpha release. Some of the code is very rough! Please give it a try with your favorite Python application, but don't trust it for production use yet. I plan to release several more alpha and beta releases over the next two months, culminating in an 1.6 final release around June first. We need your help to make the final 1.6 release as robust as possible -- please test this alpha release!!! --Guido van Rossum (home page: http://www.python.org/~guido/)

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1.5.2 -> 1.6 Changes
by Moshe Zadka March 31, 2000

March 31, 2000

Here is a new list of things that will change in the next release. Thanks to all the people who gave me hints and information! If you have anything you think I missed, or mistreated, please e-mail me personally -- I'll post an updated version soon. Obligatory ========== A lot of bug-fixes, some optimizations, many improvements in the documentation Core changes ============ Deleting objects is safe even for deeply nested data structures. Long/int unifications: long integers can be used in seek() calls, as slice indexes. str(1L) --> '1', not '1L' (repr() is still the same) Builds on NT Alpha UnboundLocalError is raised when a local variable is undefined long, int take optional "base" parameter string objects now have methods (though they are still immutable) unicode support: Unicode strings are marked with u"string", and there is support for arbitrary encoders/decoders "in" operator can now be overriden in user-defined classes to mean anything: it calls the magic method __contains__ New calling syntax: f(*args, **kw) equivalent to apply(f, args, kw) Some methods which would take multiple arguments and treat them as a tuple were fixed: list.{append, insert, remove, count}, socket.connect New modules =========== winreg - Windows registry interface. Distutils - tools for distributing Python modules robotparser - parse a robots.txt file (for writing web spiders) linuxaudio - audio for Linux mmap - treat a file as a memory buffer sre - regular expressions (fast, supports unicode) filecmp - supersedes the old cmp.py and dircmp.py modules tabnanny - check Python sources for tab-width dependance unicode - support for unicode codecs - support for Unicode encoders/decoders Module changes ============== re - changed to be a frontend to sre readline, ConfigParser, cgi, calendar, posix, readline, xmllib, aifc, chunk, wave, random, shelve, nntplib - minor enhancements socket, httplib, urllib - optional OpenSSL support _tkinter - support for 8.1,8.2,8.3 (no support for versions older then 8.0) Tool changes ============ IDLE -- complete overhaul (Andrew, I'm still waiting for the expat support and integration to add to this list -- other than that, please contact me if you want something less telegraphic <wink>) -- Moshe Zadka <mzadka(a)geocities.com>. http://www.oreilly.com/news/prescod_0300.html http://www.linux.org.il -- we put the penguin in .com

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SRE: what to do with undocumented attributes?
by Fredrik Lundh March 31, 2000

March 31, 2000

at this time, SRE uses types instead of classes for compiled patterns and matches. these classes provide a documented interface, and a bunch of internal attributes, for example: RegexObjects: code -- a PCRE code object pattern -- the source pattern groupindex -- maps group names to group indices MatchObjects: regs -- same as match.span()? groupindex -- as above re -- the pattern object used for this match string -- the target string used for this match the problem is that some other modules use these attributes directly. for example, xmllib.py uses the pattern attribute, and other code I've seen uses regs to speed things up. in SRE, I would like to get rid of all these (except possibly for the match.string attribute). opinions? </F>

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'make install' should create lib/site-packages IMO
by pf＠artcom-gmbh.de March 31, 2000

March 31, 2000

Hi! Guido van Rossum: [...] > Modified Files: > Makefile.in > Log Message: > Added distutils and distutils/command to LIBSUBDIRS. Noted by Andrew > Kuchling. [...] > ! LIBSUBDIRS= lib-old lib-tk test test/output encodings \ > ! distutils distutils/command $(MACHDEPS) [...] What about 'site-packages'? SuSE added this to their Python packaging and I think it is a good idea to have an empty 'site-packages' directory installed by default. Regards, Peter

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Re: [Python-checkins] CVS: distutils/distutils msvccompiler.py
by Thomas Heller March 31, 2000

March 31, 2000

> Simplified Thomas Heller's registry patch: just assign all those > HKEY_* and Reg* names once, rather than having near-duplicate code > in the two import attempts. Your change won't work, the function names in win32api and winreg are not the same: Example: win32api.RegEnumValue <-> winreg.EnumValue > > Also dropped the leading underscore on all the imported symbols, > as it's not appropriate (they're not local to this module). Are they used anywhere else? Or do you think they *could* be used somewhere else? Thomas Heller

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First alpha release of Python 1.6
by Guido van Rossum March 31, 2000

March 31, 2000

I'm hoping to release a first, rough alpha of Python 1.6 by April 1st (no joke!). Not everything needs to be finished by then, but I hope to have the current versions of distutil, expat, and sre in there. Anything else that needs to go into 1.6 and isn't ready yet? (Small stuff doesn't matter, everything currently in the patches queue can probably go in if it isn't rejected by then.) --Guido van Rossum (home page: http://www.python.org/~guido/)

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