2011-02-23

PSF core grant, days 33, 34, & 35: Python 3.2.0, fighting personal feature creep

First off, for those of you who don't know, Python 3.2.0 was released on February 20th (which serendipitously happens to correspond to the 20 year anniversary of Python 0.9, the first release of Python). To celebrate Python being a score old, why don't you help port a project to Python 3.2.0? =)

With Python 3.2.0 out the door, the development branch of Python was open to commits again. I was able to commit all but one of my patch queue I have been sitting on for over a month. This means that the in-development branch of Python can now run the test suite under coverage.py without any special patches. I also fixed a bunch of static analysis warnings found by Clang. I am ignoring the time burned on trying to fix test_zlib failing under OS X as people much wiser than I at mmap solved that one. I also fixed the new crypt module changes to be PEP 8 compliant and simplified the API a little.

As for the secret project, I am working on not letting feature creep get the better of me. I scaled it back slightly so that it won't start out life with as much stuff since it didn't need it everything. But then I also thought of a cool way to get more people to participate with the website through a Chrome extension. Out with one feature, in with another.

But I am reaching the ability to launch in private beta in about a week. I don't see why I won't have this ready to go for public consumption (in a rather rough state) by PyCon.