I gave a talk at PyCon 2004 and all I got was respect and admiration

I summarized this last month, but this is important so I am doing it again (and will continue to mention it until no more proposals are being accepted). PyCon is ramping up for 2004 and is putting out a Call for Proposals. Since PyCon is meant to be very broad-reaching you can propose anything from a scientific paper to a tutorial.

If you have any inkling to give a talk please send in a proposal. It can be rough; the key is that what you want to discuss can be understood from the proposal. So take a look at the link and consider coming to PyCon as a speaker and not just a attendee.

Contributing threads:

PyCon DC 2004: Call for Proposals

Web-SIG started

As stated on the SIGs page, "The Python Web SIG is dedicated to improving Python's support for interacting with World Wide Web services and clients." If there is some web-related functionality that you think Python should, this is the place to discuss it. If you think an existing Python module could stand a redesign then this is the proper forum for your ideas.

Contributing threads:

Any movement on a SIG for web lib enchancements?

I have seen the future and it includes 2.3.3

Anthony Baxter, release manager for Python 2.3.1 and 2.3.2, is already planning a 2.3.3 release in about three months time. He initially suggested that the goal of this release should be to have Python build on as many platforms as possible.

Michael Hudson listed "HPUX/ia64, various oddities on Irix" as the major troublemakers. He suggested that a sustained push to fix these build problems happen instead of trying to do it last-minute. Michael also thought it would be a good idea to try to find experts on the trouble platforms instead of having someone getting access to some machine and floundering since they don't know the OS.

Skip Montanaro quickly chimed in with http://www.python.org/cgi-bin/moinmoin/PythonTesters which is a wiki page that lists people who are available to help with testing on various OSs. Please have a look and if you think you could help out on an OS add yourself.

Contributing threads:

2.3.3 plans

Helping you help us

In response to Martin v. Löwis' email on how to handle patches, Michael Bartl expressed his disappointment that nothing had happened to his patches. It was explained to him that because of time restraints on python-dev that it can take time for people to get to all of the patches, but that his work was greatly appreciated and would eventually be looked at. Since the email Martin has managed to take a look at them (even accepted one).

The question of searching on SourceForge through the tracker items also came up. There is a search box on the left side of the page, but it is not extensive. Better than nothing.

I also posted an essay I wrote that is meant to act as a guide to how Python is developed and how anyone can help with the development regardless of abilities. You can look at the email below in the "Draft of an essay on Python development" thread referenced below in "Contributing threads". Hopefully it will end up on python.org once it is in its final form.

Contributing threads:

Patches & Bug help revisited Draft of an essay on Python development (and how to help)

Making DLLs fatter for lower file dependency

Thomas Heller suggested adding more modules to the Windows DLL as built-in so as to cut back on the number of files required to get Python to run (py2exe stands to benefit from this). The issue of having a larger DLL to have to load into memory was brought up, but Martin v. Löwis said that DLLs only load into memory what is needed to run and not the entire DLL.

The issue of making the overall DLL larger in terms of disk space was brought up, but the worry was partially minimized when the list of modules to add was limited to small modules that do not have external dependencies.

But zlib might break that last rule in order to allow importation from compressed zip files. The idea of integrating the zlib source into the Python tree was brought up, but shot down for licensing issues on top of keeping the code synchronized.

Contributing threads:

buildin vs. shared modules

Decorate-sort-undecorate eye for the list.sort guy

Raymond Hettinger suggested adding built-in support for the decorate-sort-undecorate (DSU) sorting idiom to list.sort (see the Python Cookbook recipe at http://aspn.activestate.com/ASPN/Cookbook/Python/Recipe/52234 which is recipe 2.3 in the dead tree version or Tim Peters' intro to chapter 2 for details on the idiom). After a long discussion on the technical merits of various ways to do this, list.sort gained the keyword arguments 'key' and 'reverse'.

'key' takes in a function that accepts one argument and returns what the item should be sorted based on. So running [(0,0), (0,2), (0,1)].sort(key=lambda x: x[1]) will sort the list based on the second item in each tuple. Technically the sort algorithm just runs the item it is currently looking at through the function and then handles the sorting. This avoids having to actually allocate another list. If 'key' and 'cmp' are both provided then 'key' is called on the items to be sorted and the function's return values are then passed to 'cmp'.

'reverse' does what it sounds like based on whether its argument is true or false.

list.sort also became guaranteed to be stable (this include 'reverse').

A discussion of whether list.sort should return self came up and was very quickly squashed by Guido. The idea of having a second method, though, that did sort and returned a copy of the sorted list is still being considered.

Contributing threads:

decorate-sort-undecorate list.sort

New Python 2.3.2 Windows binary

Some invalid DLLs made it into the 2.3.2 Windows binary distribution by accident. It seems to mostly affect Windows 98 and NT 4 users. The binary has been fixed and put up online. You can tell if you downloaded the fixed version by checking the filename; the new one is named Python-2.3.2-1.exe (notice the "-1").

Contributing threads:

Python-2.3.2 windows binary screwed

A call for cool itertools additions

Have an idea for something that should be added to itertools? Read http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2003-October/038916.html and see if it matches the criteria. If it does send it off to Raymond Hettinger.