2007-11-15

What I have been up to lately in PythonLand (and where I need to be going)

Considering all of my posts of late have been PyCon-related and getting the word out about talk proposals being due soon (you are going to get your proposal in by the end of Friday, right?  Good!), I figured I would post about the the heck I have been up to along with python-dev.

First, python-dev as I suspect people will be more interested in that.  Two developers joined the team recently: Amaury Forgeot d'Arc and Christian Heimes.  Both have been making a bunch of checkins lately which is great since a lot of the regulars (including me) have dropped off lately for various reasons.  They are primarily helping Guido with Py3K stuff and basic 2.6/2.5.2 bug fixes.

Speaking of fixes, I don't know when 2.5.2 or 3.0a2 will come out.  Hopefully this month, but no guarantees.

As for me, I have been busy with other things.  I got my tutorial submission for import in for PyCon.  I am honestly a little nervous they will accept the talk as I have never given a three hour talk before (longest has been two hours).  Plus knowing people will have paid for the tutorial adds extra pressure.  But hopefully what I plan to cover will interest people enough that they are up for listen to me talk about import and importlib.

I have also been busy working thesis research.  I am pulling together a demonstration for a conference that takes place a little over a week after the PyCon sprints end.  But since I was not planning to stick around for all four days (probably will leave on the third day or the night of the second) I should have enough time to relax at home before I have to fly out again.

With US Thanksgiving coming up I am hoping to spend some downtime going through my backlog of issues I created or have assigned to me.  I also want to finish my work on auto-generating PEP 0.  That is mostly adding support for a new author name format and deciding how to handle people with the same last name when listing authors of a PEP.

I should package up both importlib for 2.x and my Signature object implementation for PEP 362 and put them up on the Cheeseshop.

With my Signature object out there I am hoping I can get some feedback on it so I  can finally close off the open issues on the PEP and get public support for the code so it can be added to the stdlib at some point.

As for importlib, I need to update my Py3K importlib branch to the current Py3K code base.  I then need to get the C implementation of warnings finished.  With that done I will be able to work on backwards-compatibility within Py3K for importlib.  Once I have that I get to re-implement C APIs and rip out C code.

Blah, so much stuff!  I think I will tackle them in this order:

  1. Package up Signature object code.
  2. Package up importlib for 2.x.
  3. Go through bugs assigned to me.
  4. Finish PEP 0 work.
  5. Update Py3K importlib branch.
  6. Finish _warnings implementation.
  7. Get importlib backwards-compatible in Py3K.
  8. Re-implement C APIs using importlib.
  9. Remove C code and old APIs for import.
Once this backlog is cleared I then get to choose what the next thing will be off of my lower priority list:
  • Developer docs (e.g., how to use and write tests for the stdlib, reviewing a patch, etc.).
  • Standard library reorg for Py3K.
  • New workflow for the bug tracker.
  • Unit test classification stuff (e.g., stating in a module what OSs it should work on, what tests are implementation-specific, etc.).
But nothing in this last list gets touched until the first list is cleared.  And nothing gets added to the last list until it is cleared.