[Python-Dev] python-dev Summary for 2004-07-16 through 2004-07-31 [draft]

[Brett Cannon]

OK, so I procrastinated from doing more work on my thesis and did the 
next summary.  Plan to send this out some time over the weekend.

-------------------------------


=====================
Summary Announcements
=====================
Python 2.4a2 should be coming out any day now, so keep an eye out for it 
and test the heck out of it.


========
Summary
========
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Makin' bdist_wininst purty and nicer for them non-English speaking folks
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Thomas Heller asked if some better images for Distutil's bdist_wininst 
could be used.  Some existing images were discussed, but no specific 
resolution was mentioned in the thread.

Walter Dörwald brought up the point that if this was all being worked on 
he wouldn't mind having Unicode support for things such as author name 
and such.  Thomas and Walter worked on it and that has gone in.

Contributing threads:
   - `bdist_wininst 
<>`__
   - `None as constant. Still SyntaxWarning 
<>`__


-------------------------------------------------------------
Hopefully you didn't love FCNTL like a child...
--------------------------------------------------------------
... since if you did that kid was a lazy punk that did nothing but cause 
trouble for Windows users.  That's why it got kicked out of the house to 
never come back.

Contributing threads:
   - `Kill FCNTL.py 
<http://www.microsoft.com/msdownload/platformsdk/sdkupdate/ with only IE)
3. Download Garth's tools to generate a Makefile from the .sln files (at 
>`__


---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Tim Peters, whitespace Czar, will break your legs if you mess up the 
pristine whitespace in CVS
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Tim Peters ran Tools/Scripts/reindent.py over the entire CVS tree and 
fixed it up.  This means you had better not mess up and check in using 
anything but 4-space indents with no tabs!

Contributing threads:
   - `Fun with whitespace 
<>`__


------------------------------------------------------------------------
LC_NUMERIC PEP gets a pristine, new PEP number
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Even though the code had already been put into the core, the PEP about 
LC_NUMERIC and being locale-independent never got a PEP number.  Well, 
now it has one: `PEP 331`_.

.. _PEP 331: http://www.python.org/peps/pep-0331.html

Contributing threads:
   - `PEP 331: Locale-Independent Float/String Conversions 
<>`__


------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Any misbehaving modules during initialization from import now get the boot
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Jim Fulton wanted a better way to detect when an import failed thanks to 
another module being directly imported (e.g., module A imports B which 
raised TypeError from some initialization code from importing; importing 
would leave A and B in a shoddy state in sys.modules along with raising 
TypeError in the import from A instead of raising ImportError).  While 
the latter still occurs, modules are not left in sys.modules in a broken 
state from exceptions being raised during initialization thanks to Guido 
and Tim Peters.

There was a discussion on circular imports and how to handle those for 
proper rollback.  Some suggestions were taking a snapshot of sys.modules 
and then restoring with that if something bad happens to putting in 
placeholder modules in sys.modules so as to not try to extra imports on 
modules in the process and to help track state.  But this all gets 
sticky from side-effects that modules can do outside of themselves 
before they finish importing everyone else.  If, for instance, module A, 
as a side-effect of importation, injected a custom version of len into 
module B.  Now, if module A did this before doing all of its imports it 
could pull of the len injection but still fail from a bad import.  That 
is not good.  Basically the best solution is to not do that; there is a 
reason you should do all of your global imports as the first thing in a 
module.

Contributing threads:
   - `Fix import errors to have data 
<>`__


----------------------------------------------------------------------
Use the docs to know what the public API is, people
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Fernando Perez got bit by having something removed from the 'keyword' 
module that was not part of the documented API.  Turns out that running 
'help' on the module listed the function in question and so he just went 
ahead an used it.  That's not the right way to go about finding the 
public API of stdlib code.

Always follow the documentation.  If it is not listed there don't expect 
it to be there in the next version.  While we try not to yank stuff out 
needlessly and will tweak things to be nice on occasion, we make no 
guarantees on stuff not listed in the API.

The next best thing is what is listed in __all__ for a module.  Since 
that is explicitly listed that usually can be considered part of the API.

And lastly, anything starting with an underscore is off limits in terms 
of promises of keeping it around.

Luckily Skip Montanaro applied a patch for pydoc to have it only list 
stuff in modules as specified by __all__, so it's a little safer out 
there.  But the actual documentation is still king.

Contributing threads:
   - `Rationale behind removing kwdict from keyword.py? 
<>`__