[Python-3000] status (preparing for first alpha)

[Neal Norwitz]

Py3k is progressing nicely.  We are planning the first alpha sometime
this week.  The tests are mostly passing.  With all the churn over the
last week, I'm sure it's about to change.  :-)  AFAIK, nearly all the
tests pass on Linux and Mac OS X.  There was a report that Windows/VC8
was able to build python but it crashed in test_builtin.  Can anyone
confirm this?

Here are the tasks that we need help with before the alpha is released:
 * Verify Windows build works with VC7 (currently the default compiler for 2.5)
 * Verify Windows build passes all tests
 * Verify other Unix builds work and pass all tests
 * Fix reference leaks probably related to IO
 * Fix problem with signal 32 on old gentoo box (new IO related?)

See below for more details about many of these.

The string/unicode merge is making good progress.  There are less than
400 references to PyString.  Most of the references are in about 5-10
modules.  Less than 50 modules in the core have any references to
PyString.  We still need help converting over to use unicode.  If you
are interested in helping out, the spreadsheet is the best place to
look for tasks:
http://spreadsheets.google.com/ccc?key=pBLWM8elhFAmKbrhhh0ApQA&hl=en_US&pli=1

Separate sheets exist for C, Python, Writing, and Reading tasks.

You can review the 3.0 docs at:  http://docs.python.org/dev/3.0/
They are updated every 12 hours.  There are many parts which need improvement.

There are 4 tests that report reference leaks:

test_io leaked [62, 62] references
test_urllib leaked [122, 122] references
test_urllib2_localnet leaked [3, 3] references
test_xmlrpc leaked [26, 26] references

On the gentoo machine that builds the docs, I would like to run the
tests.  2.x is currently running python without a problem.  In 3.0,
there is a strange error about receiving an Unknown signal 32.  I'm
guessing this is related to the new IO library, but that's really a
guess.  Does anyone have a clue about what's happening here?  I don't
think I can catch the signal (I tried).  Part of the reason I suspect
IO is that the problem seems to occur while running various tests that
use sockets.  test_poplib is often the first one.  But even if that's
skipped many other tests can cause the problem, including:  test_queue
test_smtplib test_socket test_socket_ssl test_socketserver.  Perhaps
there's a test that triggers the problem and almost any other test
seems to be causing the problem?

There are some unexplained oddities.  The most recent issue I saw was
this strange exception while running the tests:

  File "Lib/httplib.py", line 1157, in __init__
    HTTPConnection.__init__(self, host, port, strict, timeout)
TypeError: unbound method __init__() must be called with
FakeHTTPConnection instance as first argument (got HTTPSConnection
instance instead)

I've seen this exactly once.  I don't know what happened.  Completely
unrelated, I also had a problem with using uninitialized memory from
test_bytes.  That also only happened once.  It could have been a
problem with an underlying library.

n