Now that my life has hit another purgatory moment (waiting to here when my wife's permanent residency interview will be and still in the ramp-up period at work), I have had some time to think about what my personal goals will be for Python 3.3. This list is in no particular order and I make no promises to actually do any of it as I only have roughly 249 days until alpha1. =)
First, I want to bootstrap in importlib as the implementation of __import__. I think I can simply freeze importlib._bootstrap, do some imports of built-in modules, and then have it almost work. The reason it is "almost" is that importlib relies on _io, which itself relies on importing the os module. That's a problem when you are trying to essentially import what will act as import. I need to have a look still at the _io code to see if the importing of os can be postponed until after importlib is up and running.
Second, I need to finish PEP 399. Before the whole work/immigration whirlwind started I submitted this PEP to python-dev and got a bunch of feedback on it. The usual push-and-shove led to what seemed to be a general consensus of what the PEP should be striving for, so I think I can wrap it up and get it accepted once I have time to incorporate the feedback (mainly watering down the wording so it is less technical).
Third, I should try to finally get PEP 362 accepted (tracking bug). The code has been up on the Cheeseshop as pep362 for over 4 years now without any complaints. Since I know there are users out there (Michael Foord keeps asking me to finally get the code into the stdlib) I figure the API is generally acceptable and there are no secret bugs creeping in there. Basically I just need to rip out the silly use of inspect that is left since I dropped Python 2 support in the development version, make sure I have proper code coverage, and write docs.
Fourth, I need to get an Amazon or Rackspace instance up that generates a coverage report for the stdlib on some reasonable schedule. This first requires me to finally review and commit Brandon Rhodes' script which gets coverage reporting much earlier in the interpreter startup than it does by default. Once that is done I need to get a VM going somewhere that can freshly check out Python, coverage.py, run the test suite under coverage, and then make the coverage report available for viewing. This will make the test coverage not only more visible, but easier for people to help increase it as a starter project when contributing to Python.
So that is everything I am hoping to do before March 3, 2012. I plan on making the coverage and importlib bootstrapping my priorities, although I will finish PEP 399 first since I hate leaving open PEPs lying about. And I am definitely going to try to not take on any more Python projects until I get through this list as this is already plenty for me to do. =)
