2006-04-16

Python-related goals for the summer

I will be done with courses (for the rest of my life!) a week from Monday. That means I will not only have a lowered stress level, but I will be on summer break. While I am interning at Google all summer, I will also be away from my girlfriend and have no courses to worry about in the evening, which should mean more time for Python work.

First, there are some documentation things I want to take care of. The dev section of the site needs a thorough cleaning up. There is stuff there that is not needed and other stuff that is totally lacking. My main thing is to get a simple checklist of what is needed for filing a bug, patch, or doing a commit.

In terms of PEP stuff, I would still like to get the .pyo deprecation PEP written. This was discussed earlier this year on python-dev, but no specific movement has happened on it. It will require having .pyc files keep track of what changes have been done to the bytecode compared to the source code (e.g., having assertions turned off or the peepholer having been used).

I also plan to help get __decorates__ used as an attribute for decorated functions to point back to the original function. That will probably just entail helping Nick Coghlan get a decorator module into the stdlib and agreeing on what a @decorator decorator should do.

Random Python stuff is also always there. Bug and patch closing is always on the list. And helping out with Python 3000 would be cool. I would really like to clean up the exceptions C code since I think it could be done better.

But the most important thing is to get moving on the bug tracker front. Thanks to Fredrik's SF scraper we have the tracker data. Next step is for me to sit down and write a call for tracker proposals and get those up and going. Then we can evaluate and make a decision on what the best tracker should be in the end.

Basically the bug tracker is top priority followed by documentation. Everything else just falls out based on my mood on the day I decide to tackle something else. =)