From: Raymond Hettinger.

I'm filling in while Brett is on vacation. To make everyone appreciate his formatting and lucidity, I'll skip the reStructuredText and write in my own terse style.

http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2002-October/029577.html Python 2.2.2. was released in final form this week. Oh, yeah!

http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2002-October/029527.html Why does the Window's installer use shortened 8.3 pathnames? Answer: It doesn't have to, but it is less confusing than dealing with pathnames that can have embedded spaces.

http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2002-October/029544.html PEP 218 was updated to match the sets.py module in CVS for Python 2.3. The question arose as to whether immutable sets should be implemented in C as a separate type or whether mutability should be a property. Answer: Keep them as different types since they support different methods. Next question: Should there be a separate language syntax for the two different types. Answer: Probably not, leave as an open question in the PEP.

http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2002-October/029542.html The -U flag was put in to test the Python standard lib for being able to handle Unicode seamlessly. It remained undocumented so that bug reports wouldn't pile up while the issues were being worked out. Progress is being made but it is possible the -U flag will never be fully implemented and released as a documented feature.

http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2002-October/029535.html Python has more than one place that is vulnerable to 32 bit word overflows unless a bunch of tests are put in place to catch unusual highly contrived cases that never come up in real world examples. Since the fixes would be ugly, wordy, and slow, it was decided to leave them alone.

http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2002-October/029024.html Tcl 8.0 and 8.1 are ancient history except in the world of Cygwin which is currently stuck with 8.0. Accordingly, Python 2.3's support for the prior versions has been cleaned out and support for UCS-4 in _tkinter has been added.

http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2002-October/029591.html Getting mtime, atime, and ctime to return floats instead of ints seemed like a simple enough change. Much discussion was held on how to accommodate the change without breaking anything that relied on the type. Though breakage would've been rare (since the only normal use for the data is to compare it or print it), Guido proposed a solution (putting the ints in the tuple) that seemed to accommodate all practical cases.

http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2002-October/029679.html Brian Quinlan teased out the design issues behind proxies and weakref objects.