From mick@translucentcode.org  Thu Jul  1 13:04:23 2004
From: mick@translucentcode.org (Michael Twomey)
Date: Thu, 01 Jul 2004 13:04:23 +0100
Subject: ANN: pygenx 0.5.3
Message-ID: <mailman.1088776031.26147.clpa-moderators@python.org>

pygenx 0.5.3 is now available:

http://software.translucentcode.org/pygenx/pygenx-0.5.3.tar.gz

http://software.translucentcode.org/pygenx/

What is it?
-----------

pygenx is a wrapper for the genx[1] canonical[2] XML generation library.

If you need a simple, fast, way of generating correct XML without
worrying about escaping characters or character entities then pygenx is
ideal.

What's changed?
---------------

In 0.5.3 I've changed the handling of files so any python class 
implementing flush() and write() methods should work now (including 
StringIO). Previously they had to contain a pointer to a C FILE struct.

I've also written a manual, which can be found in the distribution and 
online: http://software.translucentcode.org/pygenx/manual.html

Other small bugs have been fixed as well.

Example
-------

#!/usr/bin/env python

import genx

writer = genx.Writer()
fp = file("greeting.xml", "w")
writer.startDocFile(fp)
writer.startElementLiteral("greeting")
writer.addText("Hello world!")
writer.endElement()
writer.endDocument()

greeting.xml:

<greeting>Hello world!</greeting>


mick



From nas@mems-exchange.org  Thu Jul  1 17:19:54 2004
From: nas@mems-exchange.org (Neil Schemenauer)
Date: Thu, 1 Jul 2004 12:19:54 -0400
Subject: ANNOUNCE: Quixote 1.0 released
Message-ID: <mailman.1088776031.26158.clpa-moderators@python.org>

Quixote is yet another framework for developing Web applications in
Python.  Version 1.0 of Quixote is now available.  For more
information, please see:

  http://www.mems-exchange.org/software/quixote/

Note that there have been no code changes since the 1.0c1 candidate
release.


From joel@joelburton.com  Fri Jul  2 12:40:18 2004
From: joel@joelburton.com (Joel Burton)
Date: Fri, 02 Jul 2004 07:40:18 -0400
Subject: Washington, DC Zope/Python Users Group Re-Formed
Message-ID: <mailman.1088776031.26168.clpa-moderators@python.org>

After a hiatus, a new group for Python, Zope, and Plone programmers in
DC is forming. Our goal is to network and further educate ourselves on
programming in Python. While not exclusively for Zope or Plone
developers, we expect there to be a focus for these technologies.

We have a formation meeting scheduled:

  Thursday, July 8th
  7:00pm-9:00pm
  Porter Novelli Board Room, 1909 K Street NW.

This is very close to both the red line and orange lines of the DC
Metro, and close to many restaurants and bars. 
For information on the meeting, please see
http://zpugdc.org/meetings/mtg1.

At our first meeting, we'd like to plan the group and gauge
interest for regular meetings and presentations.

After the meeting, we'll likely adjourn to a nearby bar for a round of
drinks.

Our mailing list will announce future meetings, and provide
social, job-board, and technical support for DC-area Python,
Zope, and Plone users. You can subscribe by sending an email
(with the subject "subscribe") to zpugdc@lists.zpugdc.org.
You can read archives of the mailing list at 
http://www.zpugdc.org/lists/zpugdc.

If you can't make it, but might be interested in a DC Zope/Python
users group, please email us and let us know: info@zpugdc.org.

Thanks!

- Joel Burton
  for the Zope/Python Users Group of DC.



From barry@python.org  Fri Jul  2 15:40:13 2004
From: barry@python.org (Barry Warsaw)
Date: Fri, 02 Jul 2004 10:40:13 -0400
Subject: Service interruptions on mpo possible this weekend
Message-ID: <mailman.1088779322.25744.clpa-moderators@python.org>

--=-XLFwPHDn7RSJ+iHdDW23
Content-Type: text/plain
Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable

The current mail.python.org machine has had many problems over the last
few weeks, and it's time to move.  Also, we have a deadline of
06-Jul-2004 before ZopeCorp and Baymountain decommission the machine and
pull the plug on it.

Fortunately, Thomas Wouters and the fine folks at XS4ALL have donated a
machine, and your friendly neighborhood volunteer postmasters have been
working round the clock (okay, in 3-minute chunks while we recompile
Python cvs <wink>) to bring the new machine online and migrate the
existing services to it.  Given our resources, we feel pretty good that
the machine is ready to go, and we'll be taking advantage of the coming
US holiday weekend to finish the migration.

So please note that there will be planned interruptions of python.org's
mail service this weekend.  I hope that everything will be back up and
running by the end of 05-Jul-2004 somewhere in the world.  This outage
will also affect the mailing lists in the libexpat.org, porkmasters,org,
and usergroups.python.net domains.  Also, please note that this
specifically does /not/ affect the zope.org domain, since the divorce is
final and they're now living on a new dedicated server.

-Barry


--=-XLFwPHDn7RSJ+iHdDW23
Content-Type: application/pgp-signature; name=signature.asc
Content-Description: This is a digitally signed message part

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-----
Version: GnuPG v1.2.4 (GNU/Linux)

iQCVAwUAQOVzzXEjvBPtnXfVAQLeagQAtkVCxM2ZsDhqyZKpK8YJbnuB2lhTtxq6
NBye6fUYsDb3NBmpB3ZrCJbHF5tSsmOX4qwEDq0bkI3OX5IdWId/NJFPDGuiijZr
0OIo8rVuhuapZIatDPDRr6+GtjgAfbqBuC12Fq3kRFiTaf3SR2e0YgfSBEUiPjLB
wVD8kVNSyXc=
=ztMK
-----END PGP SIGNATURE-----

--=-XLFwPHDn7RSJ+iHdDW23--



From brian@sweetapp.com  Fri Jul  2 16:40:09 2004
From: brian@sweetapp.com (Brian Quinlan)
Date: Fri, 02 Jul 2004 17:40:09 +0200
Subject: Vancouver Python/Zope Meeting on Tuesday
Message-ID: <mailman.1088964663.21540.clpa-moderators@python.org>

This meeting:
=============

Paul Prescod will lead a discussion about the Python Virtual Machine.

How does the Python Virtual Machine work internally? What are
bytecodes? How is code compiled to bytecodes? How are bytecodes
interpreted? How are types implemented? What do classes look like
inside the Python interpreter?

Afterwards we'll retire to a nearby pub for the usual informal
discussion of Paul's presentation and the upcoming Vancouver Python
Workshop.

Time: Tuesday, July 6 at 7:00pm
Location: ActiveState (580 Granville St., Vancouver)

The group:
==========

The Vancouver Python and Zope User's Group is a group of Python
enthusiasts who meet once a month to discuss various Python and Zope
technologies and projects.

For more information about the Vancouver Python and Zope User's Group,
see: http://www.vanpyz.org/

For information about the upcoming Vancouver Python Workshop, see:
http://www.vanpyz.org/conference/

Cheers,
Brian



From ajw140NO@SPAMyork.ac.uk  Fri Jul  2 16:36:58 2004
From: ajw140NO@SPAMyork.ac.uk (Andrew Wilkinson)
Date: Fri, 02 Jul 2004 16:36:58 +0100
Subject: ANN: PyLinda 0.3
Message-ID: <mailman.1088964664.21552.clpa-moderators@python.org>

PyLinda 0.3

By Andrew Wilkinson <aw at cs dot york dot ac dot uk>

Introduction
---------------

Linda is an widely studied distributed computing environment, centred
around the notion of a tuple space. A tuple space is a bag (also called a
multi-set) of tuples. A tuple is an ordered, typed chunk of data. Tuple
spaces exist independently of processes in the system, and the data placed
into a tuple space also exist independently. See "Generative communication
in Linda" (1985) and "Multiple tuple spaces in Linda" both by David
Gelernter for more information on Linda.

PyLinda is a simple implementation of a linda system, however it also
includes several of the more recently proposed extensions to Linda in the
form of multiple tuple spaces, garbage collection, sane non-blocking
primitives and bulk tuple operations.

Full details can be found at the website
http://www-users.cs.york.ac.uk/~aw/pylinda

The package can be downloaded from
http://www-users.cs.york.ac.uk/~aw/pylinda/linda-0.3.tar.gz

Changes In This Version
---------------

- Efficency Updates
 * Switched to using System V Shared Memory where available.
 * Switched to using Unix domain sockets where available.
 * Switched to using map instead of an explicit loop in several places.
 * Changed main message handler to a dictionary of functions instead of a
big if/elif statement.



From tolivier@cstone.net  Fri Jul  2 19:13:08 2004
From: tolivier@cstone.net (Tom Olivier)
Date: Fri, 2 Jul 2004 14:13:08 -0400
Subject: CRITTRZ 0.7.0 Available
Message-ID: <mailman.1088964665.21569.clpa-moderators@python.org>

7-2-2004

 I am writing to announce the availability of CRITTRZ 0.7.0, the initial,
test release a population simulation library.  This software was released
on 6-2-2004 under an MIT open-source license.

CRITTRZ is designed for modeling of demographic, genetic and
disease processes in animal populations subdivided by space and social
groupings.   The system should be adaptable to modeling populations of 
many large mammal species.

CRITTRZ is written in Python and uses a strongly object-oriented
architecture. It includes an interface to the Idrisi GIS.  The initial
release is intended for computers with the Microsoft Windows operating
system.  I aim to release a later version for the Linux operating system.
You can view documentation for the system and download a zip file with
program code, documentation and examples at
www.greencreekparadigms.com/CRITTRZ.htm.

Comments to me at tolivier@cstone.net are welcome.  
Cheers. - Tom Olivier

Thomas Olivier, Ph.D.
Green Creek Paradigms, LLC
4632 Green Creek Road
Schuyler, VA  22969 USA
tolivier@cstone.net



From calfdog@yahoo.com  Fri Jul  2 19:45:06 2004
From: calfdog@yahoo.com (calfdog@yahoo.com)
Date: 2 Jul 2004 11:45:06 -0700
Subject: Python Automation Module for Internet Explorer 1.3 released
Message-ID: <mailman.1088964665.21584.clpa-moderators@python.org>

What is P.A.M.I.E - http://pamie.sourceforge.net

This tool was developed as an open source Python class (cPAMIE). 
Pamie allows you to control an instance of Internet Explorer and
access it's methods attributes, events, properties though OLE
automation .

You can write simple or complex scripts which allows you to automate
Internet Explorer.

You can easily drive them using either MS Excel, MS Access, or Oracle.

This tool was modeled after the Perl module by Henry Wasserman Sam.pm.


How is I.E. automated?:
By utilizing the following; Collections, Methods, Events and
Properties exposed by the DHTML Object Model

Who is this for?
This "free" open source tool "Pamie" was developed to help quality
assurance engineers, developers or any other technical professionals
in their web testing efforts.

USES:

* Build verification testing for a web site  
* Simulating different users logging into a web  
* Simulating different users filling in and submitting an online
enrollment.
* An aide for developing other web testing tools.

Example: Take Pamie for a test drive!


Pamie is in the early stages but is still a professional quality tool
that is quite useable and effective.

Functions that will be available for latest version. 
Current Method list in CVS: 
GetNames - NEW! 
GetCookie - NEW! 
ClickButton 
ClickImage 
ClickLink 
ClickSubmitButton 
FireEvent 
GetCheckBox  
GetCheckBoxChecked  
GetForm 
ControlNames 
GetNames
GetFormNames  
GetFrameNames  
GetListBox  
GetListBoxSelected  
GetRadioButton  
GetRadioButtonSet  
GetTextBox - new 
LocationName 
LocationURL 
Navigate 
SetCheckBox 
SetEventListBox 
SetListBox 
SetRadioButton 
SetTextBox 
UnSetCheckBox   
UnSetListBox  

 __doc__ 
__init__ 

__module__ 
 _wait_ 
 innerHTML 
outerHTML 
pageText 
quit 
refresh 


Thank you
Robert Marchetti


From jmiller@stsci.edu  Fri Jul  2 22:05:48 2004
From: jmiller@stsci.edu (Todd Miller)
Date: 02 Jul 2004 17:05:48 -0400
Subject: ANN: numarray-1.0 released
Message-ID: <mailman.1088964666.21606.clpa-moderators@python.org>

Release Notes for numarray-1.0

Numarray is an array processing package designed to efficiently
manipulate large multi-dimensional arrays.  Numarray is modeled after
Numeric and features c-code generated from python template scripts,
the capacity to operate directly on arrays in files, and improved type
promotions.

I. ENHANCEMENTS

1. User added ufuncs

There's a setup.py file in numarray-1.0/Examples/ufunc which
demonstrates how a numarray user can define their own universal
functions of one or two parameters.  Ever wanted to write your own
bessel() function for use on arrays?  Now you can.  Your ufunc can use
exactly the same machinery as add().

2. Ports of Numeric functions

A bunch of Numeric functions were ported to numarray in the new
libnumeric module.  To get these import from numarray.numeric.  Most
notable among these are put, putmask, take, argmin, and argmax.  Also
added were sort, argsort, concatenate, repeat and resize.  These are
independent ports/implementations in C done for the purpose of best
Numeric compatibility and small array performance.  The numarray
versions, which handle additional cases, still exist and are the
default in numarray proper.

3. Faster matrix multiply

The setup for numarray's matrix multiply was moved into C-code.  This
makes it faster for small matrices.

4. The numarray "header PEP"

A PEP has been started for the inclusion of numarray (and possibly
Numeric) C headers into the Python core.  The PEP will demonstrate how
to provide optional support for arrays (the end-user may or may not
have numarray installed and the extension will still work).  It may
also (eventually) demonstrate how to build extensions which support
both numarray and Numeric.  Thus, the PEP is seeking to make it
possible to distribute extensions which will still compile when
numarray (or either) is not present in a user's Python installation,
which will work when numarry (or either) is not installed, and which
will improve performance when either is installed.  The PEP is now in
numarray-1.0/Doc/header_pep.txt in docutils format.  We want feedback
and consensus before we submit to python-dev so please consider
reading it and commenting.

For the PEP, the C-API has been partitioned into two parts: a
relatively simple Numeric compatible part and the numarray native
part.  This broke source and binary compatibility with numarray-0.9.
See CAUTIONS below for more information.

5. Changes to the manual

There are now brief sections on numarray.mlab and numarray.objects in
the manual.  The discussion of the C-API has been updated.

II. CAUTIONS

1. The numarray-1.0 C-API is neither completely source level nor
binary compatible with numarray-0.9. First, this means that some 3rd
party extensions will no longer compile without errors.  Second, this
means that binary packages built against numarray-0.9 will fail,
probably disastrously, using numarray-1.0.  Don't install numarray-1.0
until you are ready to recompile or replace your extensions with
numarray-1.0 binaries because 0.9 binaries will not work.

In order to support the header PEP, the numarray C-API was partitioned
into two parts: Numeric compatible and numarry extensions. You can use
the Numeric compatible API (the PyArray_* functions) by including
arrayobject.h and calling import_array() in your module init function.
You can use the extended API (the NA_* functions) by including
libnumarray.h and calling import_libnumarray() in your init function.
Because of the partitioning, all numarray extensions must be
recompiled to work with 1.0.  Extensions using *both* APIs must
include both files in order to compile, and must do both imports in
order to run.  Both APIs share a common PyArrayObject struct.

2. numarray extension writers should note that the documented use of
PyArray_INCREF and PyArray_XDECREF (in numarray) was found to be
incompatible with Numeric and these functions have therefore been
removed from the supported API and will now result in errors.

3. The numarray.objects.ObjectArray parameter order was changed.

4. The undocumented API function PyArray_DescrFromTypeObj was removed
from the Numeric compatible API because it is not provided by Numeric.

III. BUGS FIXED / CLOSED

See
http://sourceforge.net/tracker/?atid=450446&group_id=1369&func=browse
for more details.

979834  convolve2d parameter order issues
979775  ObjectArray parameter order
979712  No exception for invalid axis
979702  too many slices fails silently
979123  A[n:n] = x no longer works
979028  matrixmultiply precision
976951  Unpickled numarray types unsable?
977472  CharArray concatenate
970356  bug in accumulate contiguity status
969162  object array bug/ambiguity
963921  bitwise_not over Bool type fails
963706  _reduce_out: problem with otype
942804  numarray C-API include file
932438  suggest moving mlab up a level
932436  mlab docs missing
857628  numarray allclose returns int
839401  Argmax's behavior has changed for ties
817348  a+=1j # Not converted to complex
957089  PyArray_FromObject dim check broken
923046  numarray.objects incompatibility  
897854  Type conflict when embedding on OS X  
793421  PyArray_INCREF / PyArray_XDECREF deprecated
735479  Build failure on Cygwin 1.3.22 (very current install).
870660  Numarray: CFLAGS build problem  
874198  numarray.random_array.random() broken?
874207  not-so random numbers in numarray.random_array
829662  Downcast from Float64 to UInt8 anomaly
867073  numarray diagonal bug?  
806705  a tale of two rank-0's
863155  Zero size numarray breaks for loop
922157  argmax returns integer in some cases
934514  suggest nelements -> size
953294  choose bug
955314  strings.num2char bug?
955336  searchsorted has strange behaviour
955409  MaskedArray problems
953567  Add read-write requirement to NA_InputArray
952705  records striding for > 1D arrays
944690  many numarray array methods not documented
915015  numarray/Numeric incompatabilities
949358  UsesOpPriority unexpected behavior
944678  incorrect help for "size" func/method
888430  NA_NewArray() creates array with wrong endianess
922798  The document Announce.txt is out of date
947080  numarray.image.median bugs
922796  Manual has some dated MA info
931384  What does True mean in a mask?
931379  numeric.ma called MA in manual
933842  Bool arrays don't allow bool assignment
935588  problem parsing argument "nbyte" in callStrideConvCFunc()
936162  problem parsing "nbytes" argument in copyToString()
937680  Error in Lib/numerictypes.py ?
936539  array([cmplx_array, int_array]) fails
936541  a[...,1] += 0 crashes interpreter.
940826  Ufunct operator don't work
935882  take for character arrays?
933783  numarray, _ufuncmodule.c: problem setting buffersize
930014  fromstring typecode param still broken
929841  searchsorted type coercion
924841  numarray.objects rank-0 results
925253  numarray.objects __str__ and __repr__
913782  Minor error in chapter 12: NUM_ or not?
889591  wrong header file for C extensions
925073  API manual comments
924854  take() errors
925754  arange() with large argument crashes interpreter
926246  ufunc reduction crash
902153  can't compile under RH9/gcc 3.2.2
916876  searchsorted/histogram broken in versions 0.8 and 0.9
920470  numarray arange() problem
915736  numarray-0.9: Doc/CHANGES not up to date

WHERE
-----------

Numarray-1.0 windows executable installers, source code, and manual is
here:

http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=1369

Numarray is hosted by Source Forge in the same project which hosts
Numeric:

http://sourceforge.net/projects/numpy/

The web page for Numarray information is at:

http://stsdas.stsci.edu/numarray/index.html

Trackers for Numarray Bugs, Feature Requests, Support, and Patches are
at the Source Forge project for NumPy at:

http://sourceforge.net/tracker/?group_id=1369

REQUIREMENTS
------------------------------

numarray-1.0 requires Python 2.2.2 or greater.  


AUTHORS, LICENSE
------------------------------

Numarray was written by Perry Greenfield, Rick White, Todd Miller, JC
Hsu, Paul Barrett, Phil Hodge at the Space Telescope Science
Institute.  We'd like to acknowledge the assitance of Francesc Alted,
Paul Dubois, Sebastian Haase, Tim Hochberg, Nadav Horesh, Edward
C. Jones, Eric Jones, Jochen K"upper, Travis Oliphant, Pearu Peterson,
Peter Verveer, Colin Williams, and everyone else who has contributed
with comments, bug reports, or patches.

Numarray is made available under a BSD-style License.  See
LICENSE.txt in the source distribution for details.

-- 
Todd Miller             jmiller@stsci.edu




From greg@cosc.canterbury.ac.nz  Sun Jul  4 02:44:28 2004
From: greg@cosc.canterbury.ac.nz (greg)
Date: Sun, 04 Jul 2004 13:44:28 +1200
Subject: ANN: PyGUI 1.5.1
Message-ID: <mailman.1088964666.21618.clpa-moderators@python.org>

PyGUI 1.5.1 is now available:

   http://www.cosc.canterbury.ac.nz/~greg/python_gui/

Bug fixes:

   - Menu item groups did not work.
	
   - Mac: Labels were not updated properly on changing
     the text property.
	
   - Mac: Setup script failed when Pyrex was not available.


What is PyGUI?
--------------

PyGUI is an experimental highly-Pythonic cross-platform
GUI API. Implementations are currently available for
MacOSX and Gtk. For a full description of the project
goals, see the PyGUI web page at the address above.



From uuu-devel@unununium.org  Sun Jul  4 19:57:18 2004
From: uuu-devel@unununium.org (Phil Frost)
Date: Sun, 4 Jul 2004 14:57:18 -0400
Subject: Unununium OS 0.1-rc2 released
Message-ID: <mailman.1088973721.25790.clpa-moderators@python.org>

Unununium is an OS in development written primarily in Python. Currently
implemented features include a fully functional Python interpreter,
floppy, ATA, and ext2 drivers written entirely in Python. For a
discussion of motives behind the development and planned features, see
<http://unununium.org/introduction>.

The most current release is available at
<http://unununium.org/download#releases>. Further questions may be
addressed to our development list, <mailto:uuu-devel@unununium.org>.

<p><a href="http://unununium.org/">Unununium OS 0.1-rc2</A> - an
operating system written in Python. (04-Jul-04)</p>


From abulka@netspace.net.au  Mon Jul  5 13:47:25 2004
From: abulka@netspace.net.au (Andy Bulka)
Date: 5 Jul 2004 05:47:25 -0700
Subject: PyNSource 1.4a - UML reverse engineering and modelling tool for Python source code
Message-ID: <mailman.1089038462.3228.clpa-moderators@python.org>

Announcing PyNSource 1.4a
A UML reverse engineering and modelling tool for Python source code.
 http://www.atug.com/andypatterns/pynsource.htm

PyNSource is a python code scanner and UML modelling tool that
generates UML diagrams that you can layout, arrange and print out. A
standalone exe release for windows users is available.

PyNSource can also generate UML ASCII / text diagrams, which you can
paste into your source code for documentation purposes, in conjunction
with an ascii art editor (see references on web site).

PyNSource can scan python source code and generate compilable Java or
Delphi code, which can be subsequently imported into more
sophisticated UML modelling tools.
 
New in this release
-------------------
Version 1.4a

GUI changes:
- Right Click on a node to delete it.
- Run Layout anytime from menu.
- Left click on background will deselect any selected shapes
Parser changes:
- Fixed indentation error causing more output than normal in text ouput
- Module level functions not treated as classes any more
- Smarter detection of composition relationships, as long as classname 
  and variable name are the same (ignoring case) then PyNSource will detect e.g.

  class Cat:
    pass

  class A:
    def __init__(self, cat):
      self.cats.append(Cat())  # always has worked, composition detected.
      self.cats.append(cat)    # new 1.4 feature, composition detected here too.

Features
--------
 * Resilient: doesn't import the python files, thus will 
   never get "stuck" when syntax is wrong. 
 * Fast
 * Recognises inheritance and composition  relationships
 * Detects the cardinality of associations e.g. 
   one to one or 1..*  etc
 * Optionally treat modules as classes - creating a 
   pseudo class for each module - module variables and 
   functions are treated as attributes and methods of a class
 * Has been developed using unit tests (supplied) so that 
   you can trust it just that little bit more ;-)
 * Free

 http://www.atug.com/andypatterns/pynsource.htm


From abulka@netspace.net.au  Mon Jul  5 13:49:25 2004
From: abulka@netspace.net.au (Andy Bulka)
Date: 5 Jul 2004 05:49:25 -0700
Subject: PyNSource 1.4a - UML reverse engineering and modelling tool for Python source code
Message-ID: <mailman.1089038462.3235.clpa-moderators@python.org>

Announcing PyNSource 1.4a
A UML reverse engineering and modelling tool for Python source code.
 http://www.atug.com/andypatterns/pynsource.htm

PyNSource is a python code scanner and UML modelling tool that
generates UML diagrams that you can layout, arrange and print out. A
standalone exe release for windows users is available.

PyNSource can also generate UML ASCII / text diagrams, which you can
paste into your source code for documentation purposes, in conjunction
with an ascii art editor (see references on web site).

PyNSource can scan python source code and generate compilable Java or
Delphi code, which can be subsequently imported into more
sophisticated UML modelling tools.
 
New in this release
-------------------
Version 1.4a

GUI changes:
- Right Click on a node to delete it.
- Run Layout anytime from menu.
- Left click on background will deselect any selected shapes
Parser changes:
- Fixed indentation error causing more output than normal in text ouput
- Module level functions not treated as classes any more
- Smarter detection of composition relationships, as long as classname 
  and variable name are the same (ignoring case) then PyNSource will detect e.g.

  class Cat:
    pass

  class A:
    def __init__(self, cat):
      self.cats.append(Cat())  # always has worked, composition detected.
      self.cats.append(cat)    # new 1.4 feature, composition detected here too.

Features
--------
 * Resilient: doesn't import the python files, thus will 
   never get "stuck" when syntax is wrong. 
 * Fast
 * Recognises inheritance and composition  relationships
 * Detects the cardinality of associations e.g. 
   one to one or 1..*  etc
 * Optionally treat modules as classes - creating a 
   pseudo class for each module - module variables and 
   functions are treated as attributes and methods of a class
 * Has been developed using unit tests (supplied) so that 
   you can trust it just that little bit more ;-)
 * Free

 http://www.atug.com/andypatterns/pynsource.htm


From barry at python.org  Tue Jul  6 06:23:11 2004
From: barry at python.org (Barry Warsaw)
Date: Tue Jul  6 06:24:19 2004
Subject: The new mail system is up
Message-ID: <1089087791.7234.64.camel@localhost>

Your friendly neighborhood volunteer postmasters have completed the
migration of the python.org mail system to the new machine donated by
XS4ALL.  We'll be watching and tweaking the system over the next few
days, but so far, everything looks pretty good.  Of course, if you
notice any problems, contact us at postmaster@python.org.

Huge thanks go to Thomas Wouters, Brad Knowles, Neil Schemenauer, and
Skip Montanaro for staying up late with me tonight. :)

-Barry

-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: not available
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 307 bytes
Desc: This is a digitally signed message part
Url : http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-announce-list/attachments/20040706/13f76dbf/attachment.pgp
From aahz at pythoncraft.com  Wed Jul  7 15:38:51 2004
From: aahz at pythoncraft.com (Aahz)
Date: Thu Jul  8 00:14:45 2004
Subject: REMINDER: BayPIGgies: July 8, 7:30pm
Message-ID: <20040707133851.GA15231@panix.com>

The next meeting of BayPIGgies will be Thurs July 8 at 7:30pm.  It will
feature Roger Binns talking about BitPim, a program that manipulates
data on cell phones.  http://bitpim.sf.net/

BayPIGgies meetings are in Stanford, California.  For more information
and directions, see http://www.baypiggies.net/


Before the meeting, some people meet at 6pm for dinner at Jing Jing in
downtown Palo Alto.  Ducky Sherwood is handling that; please send RSVPs
to ducky@osafoundation.org 
Discussion of dinner plans is handled on the BayPIGgies mailing list.

NOTE: Please RSVP by 3pm 7/8 if you want to attend the dinner.

Jing Jing
443 Emerson St. (half block north of University)      
Palo Alto
650-328-6885


Advance notice: The August 12 meeting agenda has not been set.  Please
send e-mail to baypiggies@baypiggies.net if you want to make a
presentation.
-- 
Aahz (aahz@pythoncraft.com)           <*>         http://www.pythoncraft.com/

"Typing is cheap.  Thinking is expensive."  --Roy Smith, c.l.py
From amk at amk.ca  Tue Jul  6 15:07:47 2004
From: amk at amk.ca (A.M. Kuchling)
Date: Thu Jul  8 12:26:51 2004
Subject: Python Bug Day this Saturday
Message-ID: <20040706130747.GA32569@rogue.amk.ca>

The second Python Bug Day is coming soon: Saturday, July 10, 2004.

What's a bug day?
=================

Participants meet in an IRC channel and collaboratively go through the
Python bug database, fixing and closing bugs as they go.  It's a good
way to contribute to Python and learn about the source code, helps the
developers by reducing the backlog of bugs, and makes Python 2.4 a
better release.


When?
=====

This Saturday, July 10, 2004, from 9AM to 9PM EDT (1PM to 1AM GMT).


Where?
======

The #python-dev channel on irc.freenode.net.


More information
================

For instructions and more information, see 
    http://www.python.org/cgi-bin/moinmoin/PythonBugDay

--amk
From alberanid at libero.it  Tue Jul  6 17:07:34 2004
From: alberanid at libero.it (Davide Alberani)
Date: Thu Jul  8 12:26:51 2004
Subject: IMDbPY 1.3 released
Message-ID: <2veecc.4j5.ln@snoopy.mio>

IMDbPY 1.3 is available here:
  http://imdbpy.sourceforge.net/

IMDbPY is a Python package useful to retrieve and manage the data of
the IMDb movie database.

In this release, minor changes were introduced to stay up-to-date
with the IMDb's web site.  The test suite was moved outside the tgz
package.

IMDbPY aims to provide an easy way to access the IMDb's database
using a Python script.
Platform-independent and written in pure Python, it's theoretically
independent from the data source (since IMDb provides two or three
different interfaces to their database).

IMDbPY is mainly intended for programmers and developers who want
to build their Python programs using the IMDbPY package, but some
example scripts - useful for simple users - are included.

So far the only data source supported is the IMDb web server.


-- 
Davide Alberani <alberanid@libero.it> [PGP KeyID: 0x465BFD47]
http://erlug.linux.it/~da/
From bac at OCF.Berkeley.EDU  Tue Jul  6 18:46:46 2004
From: bac at OCF.Berkeley.EDU (Brett Cannon)
Date: Thu Jul  8 12:26:52 2004
Subject: python-dev Summary for 2004-06-16 through 2004-06-30
Message-ID: <40EAD776.6060802@ocf.berkeley.edu>

Initial attempt bounced; if this actually ends up as a duplicate, sorry.

----------------

python-dev Summary for 2004-06-16 through 2004-06-30
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
This is a summary of traffic on the `python-dev mailing list`_ from June 
16, 2004 through June 30, 2004.  It is intended to inform the wider 
Python community of on-going developments on the list.  To comment on 
anything mentioned here, just post to `comp.lang.python`_ (or email 
python-list@python.org which is a gateway to the newsgroup) with a 
subject line mentioning what you are discussing. All python-dev members 
are interested in seeing ideas discussed by the community, so don't 
hesitate to take a stance on something.  And if all of this really 
interests you then get involved and join `python-dev`_!

This is the forty-third summary written by Brett Cannon (and that count is
correct; 21.5 months worth of reading and writing).

To contact me, please send email to brett at python.org ; I do not have 
the time to keep up on comp.lang.python and thus do not always catch 
follow-ups posted there.

All summaries are archived at http://www.python.org/dev/summary/ .

Please note that this summary is written using reStructuredText_ which 
can be found at http://docutils.sf.net/rst.html .  Any unfamiliar 
punctuation is probably markup for reST_ (otherwise it is probably 
regular expression syntax or a typo =); you can safely ignore it, 
although I suggest learning reST; it's simple and is accepted for `PEP 
markup`_ and gives some perks for the HTML output.  Also, because of the 
wonders of programs that like to reformat text, I cannot guarantee you 
will be able to run the text version of this summary through Docutils_ 
as-is unless it is from the `original text file`_.

.. _PEP Markup: http://www.python.org/peps/pep-0012.html

The in-development version of the documentation for Python can be found at
http://www.python.org/dev/doc/devel/ and should be used when looking up any
documentation on new code; otherwise use the current documentation as 
found at
http://docs.python.org/ .  PEPs (Python Enhancement Proposals) are 
located at http://www.python.org/peps/ .  To view files in the Python 
CVS online, go to http://cvs.sourceforge.net/cgi-bin/viewcvs.cgi/python/ 
.  Reported bugs and suggested patches can be found at the SourceForge_ 
project page.

The `Python Software Foundation`_ is the non-profit organization that 
holds the intellectual property for Python.  It also tries to forward 
the development and use of Python.  But the PSF_ cannot do this without 
donations.  You can make a donation at 
http://python.org/psf/donations.html .  Every penny helps so even a 
small donation (you can donate through PayPal or by check) helps.

.. _python-dev: http://www.python.org/dev/
.. _SourceForge: http://sourceforge.net/tracker/?group_id=5470
.. _python-dev mailing list: 
http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-dev
.. _comp.lang.python: http://groups.google.com/groups?q=comp.lang.python
.. _Docutils: http://docutils.sf.net/
.. _reST:
.. _reStructuredText: http://docutils.sf.net/rst.html
.. _PSF:
.. _Python Software Foundation: http://python.org/psf/

.. contents::

.. _last summary: 
http://www.python.org/dev/summary/2004-06-16_2004-06-30.html
.. _original text file: 
http://www.python.org/dev/summary/2004-06-16_2004-06-30.ht



Summary Announcements
=====================
The trouble plaguing mail.python.org mid-month has been cleared up.  It 
had led to some rather delayed emails so if you sent one in and it was 
ignored for no good reason you might want to consider bringing the topic 
back up.

In the little comment made by the summary count last month, I questioned 
whether that count was correct.  Turns out it was off by one; this is 
the true forty-third semi-monthly summary by me (month-long summaries I 
count as two summaries; more of a count of the number of semi-months I 
have been doing this).  So counting the two week span that I took off 
when Raymond Hettinger summarized for a week way back in October 2002 
(still waiting for the second week, Raymond  =) I have been doing this 
for 22 months straight.  And yet after all of that email I still have my 
vision intact.  Amazing.

A reader suggested that PEP mentions also include the the title of the 
PEP.  Now normally I purposefully leave it out.  Not only is it easier 
for me to not have to look up the title, but I always hope it might help 
spurn people on to read the PEP instead of going by my summary of what 
it entails.  Does that even work?  If you would rather have me state the 
title, send me an email.  Silence will be taken to mean that you are 
fine with the way I do it now.  Otherwise I need to have a certain 
number of people (have a number in my head between 1 and 100  =)  tell 
me that they would rather have me institute this change.

Summaries
=========
---------------------------------------------
Decimal type still chugging along
---------------------------------------------
Facundo Batista updated `PEP 327`_ with what are close to the last 
issues for the PEP.  There has also been some recent activity in the 
sandbox on the package.  It could still make it into 2.4 ...

And it has!  As I wrote this Decimal.py graduated kindergarten, left the 
sandbox, and is now out on the playground with the rest of Lib.  Play nice.

.. _PEP 327: http://www.python.org/peps/pep-0327.html

Contributing threads:
   - `PEP 327 (Decimal data type) updated and status 
<http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2004-June/045434.html>`__

-------------------------------------------------
CVS docs, now in handy tarball form
-------------------------------------------------
Fred Drake has tweaked the script that puts up new versions of the CVS 
docs to also upload a tarball of the HTML.  You can find that and links 
to the other in-development documentation at 
http://www.python.org/dev/doc/ .

Contributing threads:
   - `Downloadable HTML from the trunk 
<http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2004-June/045452.html>`__

---------------------------------------------
Proposed additions to heapq API
---------------------------------------------
Raymond Hettinger proposed adding two new functions to the heapq API. 
heappushpop() would take an item, push it on to the heap, and then pop 
off the smallest value.  heapiter() would return a destructive iterator. 
  The actual implementation of heappushpop() got the most discussion.

No final decision has been made, so if either function sounds good to 
you then do speak up.

Contributing threads:
   - `heapq API 
<http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2004-June/045348.html>`__

---------------------------------------
Consolidation of CJK codecs
---------------------------------------
Hye-Shik Chang consolidated the various CJK codecs into various files 
and managed to save some space in terms of the files themselves.  As M-A 
Lemburg pointed out, though, there was no need to in terms of loading 
size since most linkers mmap only what is needed to run.

Contributing threads:
   - `Planned updates for cjkcodecs before 2.4a1 
<http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2004-June/045415.html>`__

------------------------------------------------
Function decorators in 2.4 ... maybe
------------------------------------------------
The topic of whether function decorators would go into 2.4, and if so 
with what syntax, continued to be debated from the `last summary`_. 
Beyond reference implementations (which include an implementation not 
requiring new syntax), nothing really changed.  Overall people agreed 
they would like to see it in 2.4 using whatever syntax Guido chooses 
(and he has three in mind, so no more suggestions!), but if he felt the 
need to wait then functionality would be held off for 2.5 .

Contributing threads:
   - `functions decorators in 2.4? 
<http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2004-June/045440.html>`__
   - `decorators and 2.4 
<http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2004-June/045516.html>`__

-------------------------------------------------------------------------
Making ``''.join(list_of_strs)`` an inconsequential idiom
-------------------------------------------------------------------------
As most people know, concatenating strings in a 'for' loop is a bad 
idea; the idiom you are supposed to use is to store the strings you want 
to concatenate in a list and the pass it to ``''.join(list_of_strs)``. 
This is because string addition requires allocating memory for the size 
of the concatenation and then copying from both strings into the new 
memory.  The constant new memory allocation is costly when you have a 
loop that goes for more than a few iterations.

Raymond Hettinger suggested altering the str object to have a pointer 
that would point to any strings that were meant to be treated as 
concatenated to the current string.  The problem with this is that it 
grew the str object the size of a pointer and that is costly for a 
object as common as string.

Armin Rigo gave this challenge a shot and ended up with a bunch of code 
that special-cases the BINARY_ADD opcode.  Neither solution as been 
accepted at this moment.

Contributing threads:
   - `Wild Idea for the Year 
<http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2004-June/045488.html>`__
   - `Building strings with += 
<http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2004-June/045504.html>`__

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Possible exposure of universal newlines outside of the file object
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Scott David Daniels suggested a new itertools function that would work 
like universal newlines but for strings or files already opened without 
universal newlines turned on.  People were receptive to the idea, just 
not for putting it into itertools.  Suggestions ranged from exposing the 
functionality as a static method of the file type to sticking it into 
'string'.  No conclusion of where to put it was reached.

Contributing threads:
   - `Possible addition to itertools 
<http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2004-June/045456.html>`__

----------------------------------
NOP does exist I tell you!
----------------------------------
Raymond Hettinger asked if anyone objected to adding a no-op opcode 
(aptly named NOP).  People said nope (see?  "NOP", "nope", sound the 
same?  <eddie izzard>Forget it</eddie izzard>).  So it's in.

Contributing threads:
   - `NOP 
<http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2004-June/045491.html>`__

---------------------------------------------------------------
Yes, the Windows binary for 2.4 will use VC 7.1
---------------------------------------------------------------
Yes, Python 2.4 will use VC 7.1 .  No, we are not going to have a VC 6 
binary (you can build it if you want, though).  No, distributing the 
needed DLLs with the installer does not go against the GPL to the best 
of our knowledge (even though the codebase is not GPL but more BSD and 
no one from the FSF has told it including the DLLs is wrong).  Maybe, we 
will use Martin v. Loewis' MSI installer, maybe not (still being debated 
as this was being written).

Contributing threads:
   - `VC 7.1 maintenance? 
<http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2004-June/045357.html>`__

-------------------------------------
Possible itertools additions
-------------------------------------
Raymond Hettinger suggested two itertools additions; count_elements and 
pairswap.  The former counts the number of times an item appears in the 
passed-in iterable and returns pairs of the count and the item.  The 
latter takes an iterable that returns pairs and returns an iterable that 
returns those pairs swapped.

In the end people didn't see the need for pairswap.  People did want 
count_elements, but not as an iterator but as something that returned a 
dictionary.  It was suggested as both a class method of dict and as a 
new bucket type that could possibly go into the 'collections' module. 
No final decisions yet, though.

Contributing threads:
   - `Candidate Itertools 
<http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2004-June/045394.html>`__

---------------------------------------------------------
Gettin' PEP 292 ("Simpler String Substitutions") into 2.4
---------------------------------------------------------
Barry Warsaw brought up the point that `PEP 292`_ was slated to go into 
2.4 (it's currently in the sandbox).  The two biggest questions was the 
names of the new functions and where to stick them.  The name issue was 
not quite as bad once Barry explained the reasoning behind the existing 
names.

Where to put the code, though, was not so easily dealt with.  The 
original idea (which Barry and I came up with, so I am biased here) was 
to turn the string module into a package with the new code going there. 
  Barry also pointed out that the code in 'string' that is deprecated 
and will eventually go away can be moved into an individual module that 
can just simply be deleted from the package later and then dismissed 
with the removal of a single ``import *`` line in __init__.py for the 
package.

Not everyone saw the utopia Barry and I were trying to build.  People 
suggested just not bothering with turning 'string' into a package. 
Still others suggested a new package altogether; 'stringlib' and 'text' 
were suggested names.  It's still not resolved.

.. _PEP 292: http://www.python.org/peps/pep-0292.html

Contributing threads:
   - `PEP 292 for Python 2.4 
<http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2004-June/045406.html>`__

-------------------------------------------------------------------------
Having u.encode() return something other than strings
-------------------------------------------------------------------------
Currently unicode.encode() returns only strings.  M-A Lemburg wanted to 
lift this restriction.  Guido pointed out that this could possibly cause 
problems for type inferencing since the return type would vary based on 
an argument (which made me happy since my masters thesis ties into this 
stuff).  A compromise was reached where the method will only return 
8-bit or Unicode strings; basically only subtypes of basestring.

Contributing threads:
   - `Allowing u.encode() to return non-strings 
<http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2004-June/045417.html>`__

--------------------------------------------------
Comparing floats and longs is a pain
--------------------------------------------------
Basically this all boiled down to this (quoted from Michael Chermside): 
"when comparing a long with a float where the exponent is larger than 
the precision, that the float should be treated as if it were EXACTLY 
EQUAL TO <coefficient>*2^<exponent>, instead of trying to treat it as 
some sort of a range."  Guido said he would like to see this in 2.4 if 
someone would write up the code and commit it.

Contributing threads:
   - `Comparing heterogeneous types 
<http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2004-June/045460.html>`__

----------------------------------------------------------
German and Turkish docstrings from pydoc
----------------------------------------------------------
Martin v. Loewis is currently trying to figure out where to put partial 
translations of docstrings in the stdlib for pydoc to use as appropriate.

Contributing threads:
   - `Including translated doc strings in 2.4 
<http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2004-June/045490.html>`__

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
What to do when 'raise' is called after the last exception was caught
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
What should happen if you call 'raise' when you already caught the last 
exception that was raised?  People debated what the official docs said. 
  Seemed to coalesce to be what ever the last exception was; caught or 
not.  This ties into being what exception was currently stored.

Contributing threads:
   - `Re-raise in absence of an "active" exception 
<http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2004-June/045497.html>`__

---------------------------------------------------------------------
Can you help with cleaning up the Demo directory?
---------------------------------------------------------------------
The Demo directory is in need of some TLC.  A bunch of modules in there 
are out of date and could use an update to current Python abilities.  If 
you care to help by submitting patches to update the code that would be 
great.  There is a large swath of code in there varying from extremely 
simple to involved so if the mood ever strikes you there will be 
something for everyone.

And if you attend the next Python Bug Day you can also work on it then.

Contributing threads:
   - `What can we do about dealing with the Demo directory? 
<http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2004-June/045654.html>`__

--------------------------------------------------------------------
No more expected test failures on Windows for 2.4
--------------------------------------------------------------------
The bsddb tests are now expected to pass on Windows.  What this means is 
that failures are no longer the norm on Windows for the Python 
regression testing suite.

Contributing threads:
   - `Joy in Berkeley Windowsland 
<http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2004-June/045669.html>`__

------------------------------------------------------
Getting accessible local dicts per thread
------------------------------------------------------
Jim Fulton wanted to expose the pre-thread local dict .  He has an 
implementation going that he is going to play with and work the kinks 
out of.  After that the code will most likely be committed.

Contributing threads:
   - `Proposal: thread.get_dict 
<http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2004-June/045681.html>`__

--------------------------------
Where to stick SHA-256
--------------------------------
Someone contributed a patch for adding SHA-256 support.  A discussion 
built up over where to put it, if at all.  It's still going on at this 
moment.  Most people seem to agree that if it is included, it should 
either just be another function in the sha module or that sha.sha() 
should accept an optional argument specifying how many bits to use for 
the hash.

Contributing threads:
   - `SHA-256 module 
<http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2004-June/045724.html>`__

------------------------------------------
Making weakrefs subclassable
------------------------------------------
Fred Drake has a patch to add the ability to subclass weakrefs.  He 
wasn't sure if there would be a performance penalty though.  But Tim 
Peters stepped up and said there wouldn't be.  So it looks like it 
should go in shortly.

Contributing threads:
   - `making weakref.ref objects subclassable 
<http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2004-June/045787.html>`__

From brian at sweetapp.com  Wed Jul  7 17:16:08 2004
From: brian at sweetapp.com (Brian Quinlan)
Date: Thu Jul  8 12:26:52 2004
Subject: ANN: Vancouver Python Workshop - Jon Udell new keynote speaker
In-Reply-To: <40E2E20D.2080001@sweetapp.com>
References: <40CF1521.5040901@sweetapp.com> <40D5D59A.4060004@sweetapp.com>
	<40D86489.5060604@sweetapp.com> <40DC539D.2060206@sweetapp.com>
	<40E024D5.9090906@sweetapp.com> <40E2E20D.2080001@sweetapp.com>
Message-ID: <40EC13B8.4010509@sweetapp.com>

What's New?
===========

Due to a cancellation, we are pleased to announce that John Udell will 
be our second keynote speaker.

Jon Udell is an author, information architect, software developer and 
groupware evangelist. He has been an independent consultant, was BYTE 
Magazine's editor-at-large, executive editor and Web maven, and long 
ago developed business information products for Lotus. In June 2002 he 
joined InfoWorld as lead analyst. He also writes a monthly column for 
the O'Reilly Network.

Due to this change of plans, early bird conference registration has
been extended until Friday (July 9th). Registration is CDN$100 with 
significant discounts for students. Late registration will be available 
until the conference starts, but at a greater cost.

To register, see:
http://www.vanpyz.org/conference/registration

For general conference information, see:
http://www.vanpyz.org/conference

About the Vancouver Python Workshop
===================================

The conference will begin on July 31st with a keynote address by Guido
van Rossum (the creator of Python) and Jon Udell (InfoWorld lead
analyst). Further talks (and tutorials for beginners) will take place
on August 1st and 2nd. The conference will be roughly divided into
three tracks:

   o General Python Topics
   o Web application development with Python (esp. Zope and Plone)
   o Python for beginners

More information see: http://www.vanpyz.org/conference/
or contact Brian Quinlan at: brian@sweetapp.com

Vancouver
=========

In addition to the opportunity to learn and socialize with fellow
Pythonistas, the Vancouver Python Workshop also gives visitors the
opportunity to visit one of the most extraordinary cities in the world
(1). For more information about traveling to Vancouver, see:

http://www.vanpyz.org/conference/travel.html
http://www.tourismvancouver.com

Important dates
===============
Attendee registration: until July 9th
Late registration: from July 10th
Keynotes: July 31st
Conference and tutorial dates: August 1st and 2nd

(1) http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/business/2299119.stm
    http://www.mercerhr.com/pressrelease/details.jhtml?idContent=1128760

Cheers,
Brian


From anthony at computronix.com  Wed Jul  7 18:14:02 2004
From: anthony at computronix.com (Anthony Tuininga)
Date: Thu Jul  8 12:26:53 2004
Subject: cx_Freeze 3.0 beta2
Message-ID: <40EC214A.7060305@computronix.com>

What is cx_Freeze?

cx_Freeze is a set of utilities for freezing Python scripts into
executables using many of the techniques found in Thomas Heller's
py2exe, Gordon McMillan's Installer and the Freeze utility that ships
with Python itself.


Where do I get it?

http://starship.python.net/crew/atuining
http://www.computronix.com/utilities.shtml
(it may be a few days before the second site is updated)

What's new?

  1) Fix issues with locating the initscripts and bases relative to the
     directory in which the executable was started.
  2) Added new base executable ConsoleKeepPath which is used when an
     existing Python installation is required (such as for FreezePython
     itself).
  3) Forced the existence of a Python installation to be ignored when
     using the standard Console base executable.
  4) Remove the existing file when copying dependent files; otherwise, an
     error is raised when attempting to overwrite read-only files.
  5) Added option -O (or -OO) to FreezePython to set the optimization
     used when generating bytecode.

-- 
Anthony Tuininga
anthony@computronix.com

Computronix
Distinctive Software. Real People.
Suite 200, 10216 - 124 Street NW
Edmonton, AB, Canada  T5N 4A3
Phone:	(780) 454-3700
Fax:	(780) 454-3838
http://www.computronix.com

From csad7 at t-online.de  Wed Jul  7 20:14:11 2004
From: csad7 at t-online.de (c.)
Date: Thu Jul  8 12:30:41 2004
Subject: ANN: pyXSLdoc 0.65
Message-ID: <40EC3D73.70603@cdot.de>

what is it
----------
An application to produce documentation for XSLT files in XHTML format, 
similar to what javadoc does for Java files.

changes since the last release
------------------------------
* shortcomments on overview tables are shown now (in ReST version only)
* new options
     --windowtitle
	will be shown as Main Headline on overview page if no doctitle given or 
found
     --doctitle
	doctitle.txt in ReST format will be shown at the top of overview page
     --encoding
	specify the encoding of additional ReST documentation files like 
help.txt overview.txt or directory.txt.
* improved
     --verbose, -v
	output prints messages about used doctitle, overview and helpfile ReST 
files now
* bugfixes and Javadoc comment style improvements suggested by Doron Enav


see http://cthedot.de/pyxsldoc/README.txt for a complete list of changes


license
-------
pyXSLdoc is published under the LGPL.


download
--------
download pyXSLdoc v0.65 - 040707 from http://cthedot.de/pyxsldoc/

pyXSLdoc needs
* Python 2.3 (tested with Python 2.3.4 on Windows XP only)
* Pyana (tested with Pyana 0.9.1 only)
* Docutils (tested with Docutils 0.3 only)


usage
-----
Copy the XSLT files to document in a directory below pyXSLdoc (you could 
also give the complete path to your files but that would end up like 
that in the documentation). Then start the documentation process with

 >python xsldoc.py DIRNAMES FILENAMES [options]

DIRNAMES
     directories with XSLT files to document,e.g. dir1 dir2
All directories and XSLT files below a given directory will be 
processed, so you can just use your XSLT package main directory name or 
use option -s.
FILENAMES
     single XSLT files to document, e.g. file1.xsl path/file2.xsl

options
~~~~~~~
-sSOURCEPATH, --sourcepath=SOURCEPATH
	 sourcepath to XSLTs, all XSLT files under this path will be documented 
and ``$SOURCEPATH/doctitle.txt`` and ``$SOURCEPATH/overview.txt`` will 
be used for the overview. Alternatively you might also simply list all 
dirs and XSLT files to document.
-j, --javadoc, --htmldocs
     process comments in Javadoc style (XHTML and @tags). Default is 
reStructuredText (ReST).

-dDOCPATH, --docpath=DOCPATH
	documentation target directory. Default is ``./_xsldoc``

--windowtitle=WINDOWTITLE
     browser window title for the documentation. Text only, no markup.
--doctitle=DOCTITLE
     show the contents of this ReST .txt file at the top of the overview 
page. Default is ``$SOURCEPATH/doctitle.txt``. If ommitted or no file is 
found, WINDOWTITLETEXT is used.
-oOVERVIEW, --overview=OVERVIEW
     show the contents of this ReST .txt file on the overview page. 
Default is ``$SOURCEPATH/overview.txt``
--helpfile=HELPFILE
	show the information of this ReST .txt file on the help page. Default 
is ``./HELP.txt``.
--encoding=ENCODING
	 encoding of additional documenting ReST files (HELP.txt, doctitle.txt, 
overview.txt, directory.txt etc.). Default is utf-8. (Encoding of XSLT 
files and comments in these is of course read from the XSLT file itself.)

-r, --removedocs
	remove all comments from given XSLTs and save results in 
COMMENTSTRIPPEDPATH. Present files will be OVERWRITTEN!
-cCOMMENTSTRIPPEDPATH, --commentstrippedpath=COMMENTSTRIPPEDPATH
	path where XSLTs will be saved after removing of all docs. Only used 
when option ``--removedocs`` is given. Default directory is 
``./_optimized``.

-v, --verbose
	show more detailed information while generating the documentation


thanks for the interest. any comment is appreciated
christof hoeke http://cthedot.de


<P><A HREF="http://cthedot.de/pyxsldoc/">pyXSLdoc 0.65</A> - generate 
XSLT documentation (7-Jul-04)


From follower at gmail.com  Thu Jul  8 00:47:28 2004
From: follower at gmail.com (Follower)
Date: Thu Jul  8 12:31:05 2004
Subject: [ANN] libgmail 0.0.3 -- Gmail access via Python
Message-ID: <3c18c08f.0407071447.4271559f@posting.google.com>

libgmail -- Python binding for Google's Gmail service

<http://libgmail.sf.net/>

The `libgmail` project is a pure Python binding to provide access to
Google's Gmail web-mail service.

The library currently ships with one demonstration utility to archive
messages from a Gmail account into mbox files, suitable for importing
into a local email client.

License: GPL 2.0

Major changes since 0.0.1 & 0.0.2:

  * Archive Gmail to mbox utility.

  * No longer requires external ClientCookie package.

  * Uses constants extracted directly from Gmail Javascript,
    and includes utility to repeat the process if required.

  * Code & API refactoring.

  * Lazy retrieval and caching of thread and message data.

  * Sourceforge project & home page.


<p><a href="http://libgmail.sf.net/">libgmail 0.0.3</a> - The
`libgmail` project is a pure Python binding to provide access to
Google's Gmail web-mail service. (08-Jul-04)</p>
From gansevle at mamba.cs.utwente.nl  Thu Jul  8 11:22:49 2004
From: gansevle at mamba.cs.utwente.nl (Fred Gansevles)
Date: Thu Jul  8 12:31:21 2004
Subject: ANN: wreg-1.2.1
Message-ID: <20040708092249.4A50C50D6F@mamba.cs.utwente.nl>

Straihghtforward Windows Registry access -- wreg Version 1.2.1

What is it?
===========

wreg is a module implementing functions to access and manipulate the
Windows Registry. The main goal is to simplify both the substring notation
for registry keys an the access to registry data.


What's new in version 1.2.1?
============================

* Requires Python 2.2 and up

* Automatically enables security tokens if the user may Save, Load and
  UnLoad a registry key and the platform supports it (i.e. needs win32all).
  If the user has no rights or the platform doesn't support changing the
  rights, then SaveKey, LoadKey and UnLoad key always return None.

* Added support for loading from, and saving to a regedit-style '.reg'
  file (Import and Export methods).

* Added finding and copying Keys (Find and Add methods)

* Usable on non-windows platforms with a pseudo-registry hive (RegObject)
  so you can test and/or manipulate '.reg' files (i.e. on Linux), before
  applying them on a windows platform.

* Predefined toplevel keys kan directly be used in both the long form and
  the short form (i.e.: HKEY_LOCAl_MACHINE and HKLM).


Where can I get it?
===================

wreg is located at http://www.ewi.utwente.nl/~gansevle/python/wreg-1.2.1.zip


Have Fun!
____________________________________________________________________________
 Fred Gansevles <mailto:Fred.Gansevles@ewi.utwente.nl> Phone: +31 53 489 4613
 Org.: Twente University, Fac. of EWI, Box 217, 7500 AE Enschede, Netherlands
    "Linux is like a wigwam, No windows, no gates and an apache inside"
From mark at prothon.org  Thu Jul  8 01:37:20 2004
From: mark at prothon.org (Mark Hahn)
Date: Thu Jul  8 12:31:38 2004
Subject: Prothon 0.1.2 is getting close to alpha
Message-ID: <005301c4647b$5eff4840$0d01a8c0@MarkVaio>

Prothon is pleased to announce another major release of the language,
version 0.1.2, build 710 at http://prothon.org.

This release adds many new features and demonstrates the level of maturity
that Prothon has reached.  The next release after this one in approximately
a month will be the first release to incorporate the final set of frozen
Prothon 1.0 language features and will be the Alpha release.  You can see
the set of features still under discussion for 1.0 at the new Prothon WIKI
at: http://prothon.org/wiki.

This list is not only long but the changes are mostly major features.

Changes in version 0.1.2....

 - print is now a function, not a keyword
- function-as-command feature allows print to be used without parens
- Added prop keyword and properties feature with wildcards
- Changed del_ to final_ so properties could use get_, set_, & del_
- a += b type assignments now always do a = a + b
- New in-place modify operators a +! b, a -! b, a *! b, etc.
- Formal parameter default values now evaluated at call time
- String now stored with native 24-bit ordinal values
- Split String type into seperate String and Bytes (binary) types
- Split File into File and TextFile
- Replaced String % operator with String.fmt()
- Added cmp_ and eq_? for strings of length 1 and Ints
- Added object-oriented Directory object and methods
- Added TempDir and TempFile (deleted at shutdown)
- Added basic DateTime object
- Added WeakRef object with callback feature on obj modification
- Added Slice object
- getItem_, setItem_, and delItem_ now allow any object indexing
- Finalization now called on shutdown
- Added built-in range() generator (not list function)
- Added List(iter_) constructor
- Octal constant format changed from 0377 to 0o377
- Octal esc sequence changed from \0377 to \o377
- except keyword no longer allowed alone, must use "except Exception"
- except syntax changed from "except exc, var" to "except exc as var"
- Function formal params now introspectable via simple attribute
- *args param local variable in func is now a tuple, not a list
- Added immutable check to dictionary function key parameter
- Added Dict.len_ and Dict.bool_?
- Moved File from extension module to built-in
- Changed File.stdxxx to sys.stdIn, sys.stdOut, and sys.stdErr
- changed Len, Cmp, len,  cmp,  chr,  ord to
  len, cmp, len_, cmp_, chr_, ord_
- changed Sys to sys, changed sys.ps1, sys.ps2 to sys.cons.ps1,
  sys.cons.ps2
- Changed SQLite to sqlite, OS to os, Re to re
- Change symbol prefix from backtick (`var) to dollar-sign ($var)
- Changed console prompt from >>> to O>>
- Added many new *.pr test files
- Fixed raise keyword so second arg is doc_ attribute of first
- Fixed crash on printing recursive containers, now prints ...
- Fixed assignment from sequences to arg lists and for statements
- Fixed import in console
- Fixed bug in Func constructor
- Fixed bug in string.rstrip, string.strip, and string.find


Prothon is an interpreted dynamic language that takes much from Python but
is not compatible with Python as it uses the simpler prototypes instead of
classes.  Prothon is an industrial strength language that uses native OS
threads and 64-bit architecture.  For a description of Prothon see the
tutorial at
    http://prothon.org/wiki?pagename=TutorialHomePage.

Mark Hahn
email: mark at prothon.org

From middleware04 at eecg.toronto.edu  Wed Jul  7 19:18:58 2004
From: middleware04 at eecg.toronto.edu (Middleware 04)
Date: Thu Jul  8 12:31:51 2004
Subject: Middleware'04 Final Call for Workshops and Posters
Message-ID: <Pine.GSO.4.58.0407071317080.25076@ra.eecg.toronto.edu>


                                 ACM/IFIP/USENIX
                            Middleware 2004 Workshops

                       Call For Workshop Papers and Posters

                  http://www.eecg.toronto.edu/middleware2004/ws.htm

Middleware'2004 will host three exciting workshops and a long-waited Doctoral
Symposium. Workshop papers will be published in the Middleware'2004 Companion
Proceedings and in the ACM Digital library. Please visit the workshop pages
for specific submission details.

    * 3rd Workshop on Adaptive and Reflective Middleware

    * 2nd Workshop on Middleware for Grid Computing

    * 2nd Workshop on Middleware for Pervasive and Ad-Hoc Computing

    * 1st International Middleware Doctoral Symposium


To visit the pages of each workshop, follow the links in
http://www.eecg.toronto.edu/middleware2004/ws.htm

Important Dates:
Workshop paper submissions:     July 10th, 2004
Notification of acceptance:     August 10th, 2004
Camera-ready papers:            September 1st, 2004
Workshops:                      October 18th or 19th, 2004

******************************************************************************

                                 ACM/IFIP/USENIX
                            Middleware 2004 Workshops

                                Call For Posters


Posters are meant for publicizing current research initiatives as well
as interesting new systems implemented using middleware
technology.  Reports of preliminary experience from middleware use
cases are solicited.  A 500-word summary of the poster's contents
should be submitted by July 10th, 2004.  Along with the notification of
acceptance, authors will receive formatting instructions for the
posters to be presented at the conference.

Poster summaries will be published as part of the workshop
proceedings.  Note that the poster summaries will not be published
within the conference proceedings.

Submissions should be in PDF or PS format and should be sent directly
by e-mail to the Posters Chair at delara@cs.toronto.edu, with the
following subject line: "Middleware 2004 Poster Submission".


Important Dates:
Poster submissions:             July 10th, 2004
Notification of acceptance:     August 10th, 2004

For additional information contact:
Eyal de Lara
Middleware2004 Posters Chair
Department of Computer Science
University of Toronto
Tel: +1-416-946-8656; Fax: +1-416-978-4765
delara@cs.toronto.edu
From middleware04 at eecg.toronto.edu  Thu Jul  8 01:24:32 2004
From: middleware04 at eecg.toronto.edu (Middleware 04)
Date: Thu Jul  8 12:31:52 2004
Subject: MGC2004 DEADLINE EXTENSION - 2nd Workshop on Middleware for Grid
 Computing
Message-ID: <Pine.GSO.4.58.0407071844230.28204@ra.eecg.toronto.edu>


	MGC2004 - 2nd International Workshop on Middleware for Grid Computing

	in conjunction with the 5th International Middleware Conference 2004

	Toronto, Ontario, Canada - October 18th, 2004
		http://mgc2004.lncc.br



Announcements:
*************

*************  Submission deadline has been extended to July 18th.  **********
*************  No further extensions will be given.                 **********

	       Given the submission extension, notification of acceptance
	       will be delayed until August 14th.
	       The deadline for the camera-ready paper version has not changed
	       and is a hard dealine !!
	       To reduce the effort necessary for preparation of the
	       camera-ready version, authors are advised to submit their papers
	       already in ACM format.


History: The first edition of this workshop (MGC2003) was held on June 17th 2003,
in conjunction with the Middleware Conference, in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. MGC2003
saw a good combination of the many different flavors in Middleware for Grid Computing,
with 16 technical presentations and discussions on several stimulating topics
including, among the others, Classic Grids, object oriented technologies, Service-
based Grids, Open grid Service Architecture, Agent Grid, Interactive Grid, Grid
Economy / Scheduling, and Portlets. After the event, extended and thoroughly revised versions of the papers were invited to a Special Issue of Concurrency and Computation Practice and Experience Journal - Vol.16 N.5 2004. The first workshop generated
substantial interest in the community and we hope to build on this tradition this
year. Far from exhausting the topics of interest, MGC2003 paved the way for a second
edition of the workshop, that will continue the most interesting and stimulating
topics emerged last year, and also include some novel issues.

Description: Much of the focus of Grid until recently has been within research
organizations. Currently the involvement of commercial organization has increased tremendously. That leads to a greater focus on integration with commercial computing
models and more work on the security and resource management models required for
automated and secure access negotiation for remote resources. In order to control
such a broad base of resources, Grid Computing has a middleware layer which controls
the distributed execution of applications.

In this Workshop we would encourage researchers from the various GRID middleware
communities to submit and present original work for publication. Overall topics of
interest include but are not limited to:
	Classic Grid Middleware
	Object Oriented technologies or Component Middleware
	WSRF/OGSA/Web services
	Grid Middleware Architectures
	Grid Services
	Grid Middleware Security
	Resource Management and Scheduling
	Strategies and protocols for obtaining QoS
	Semantic Grid Middleware
	Managing Information in Grid Middleware
	Grid Object Metadata and Schemas
	Programming Models, Tools, and Environments
	Performance Evaluation and Modeling
	Evolution of and experiences with Grid systems
	Wireless Grids
	Data Grid Middleware
	Dependability and Fault Tolerance in Grids
	Virtualization in Grids

Paper Submission: The Workshop on Middleware for Grid Computing invites authors to
submit original and unpublished work. Papers should not exceed 4-6 single-spaced
pages of text using 10 point size type on A4 paper. Authors should submit a PostScript (level 2) or PDF file that will print on a PostScript printer. Submission implies
the willingness of at least one of the authors to register and present the paper.
All selected papers for are peer-reviewed and will be published in the ACM Digital
Library. Selected (extended) papers will be invited to a special issue of Concurrency
and Computation: Practice and Experience Journal for 2005. Some papers may be selected
to be presented as posters. Electronic only submission.

Important Dates:		Paper Submissions:    	 	July 18th, 2004
				Papers Not. of acceptance:	August 14th, 2004
				Papers Camera-ready:     	September 1st, 2004

Program Committee (preliminar)
* David Abramson - Monash U. AU
* Cristiana Amza - U Toronto, CA
* Rajkumar Buyya - U Melbourne, AU
* Jim Basney - NCSA/UIUC, USA
* Emmanuel Cecchet - INRIA Alpes, FR
* Renato Cerqueira - PUC-Rio, BR
* Walfredo Cirne - UFCG, BR
* Geoff Coulson - Lancaster U, UK
* Petre Dini - Cisco Systems & Concordia U, CA
* Geoffrey Fox - U Indiana, US
* Wolfgang Gentzsch - MCNC, US
* Kate Keahey - U Chicago and ANL, US
* Edmundo Madeira - UNICAMP, BR
* Thomas Magedanz - TU Berlin & FHG Fokus, DE
* Radha Nandkumar - NCSA/UIUC, US - Workshop Co-Chair
* Andrea Omicini - U Bologna, IT
* Fabio Porto - LNCC, BR - Publicity Co-Chair
* Omer Rana - Cardiff U, UK
* Vinod Rebello - UFF, BR
* Noemi Rodrigues - PUC-Rio, BR
* Bruno Schulze - LNCC, BR - Workshop Co-Chair
* Stefan Tai - IBM T J Watson, US
* Carlos Westphall - UFSC , BR
From anthony at python.org  Fri Jul  9 09:11:34 2004
From: anthony at python.org (Anthony Baxter)
Date: Fri Jul  9 12:34:28 2004
Subject: RELEASED Python 2.4, alpha 1
Message-ID: <40EE4526.5060306@python.org>

On behalf of the Python development team and the Python community, I'm
happy to announce the first alpha of Python 2.4.

Python 2.4a1 is an alpha release. We'd greatly appreciate it if you
could download it, kick the tires and let us know of any problems you
find, but it is not suitable for production usage.

     http://www.python.org/2.4/

In this release we have a number of new modules, a number of existing
modules that have been reimplemented in C for speed, a large number of
improvements and additions to existing modules and an even larger list
of bugs squished. See either the highlights, the What's New in Python
2.4, or the detailed NEWS file -- all available from the Python 2.4
webpage.

There will be at least one more alpha release in a couple of weeks to
pick up a few new features that didn't make it into the first alpha,
before we release 2.4 betas and then the final release.

Please log any problems you have with this release in the SourceForge
bug tracker (noting that you're using 2.4a1):

     http://sourceforge.net/bugs/?group_id=5470

Enjoy the new release,
Anthony

Anthony Baxter
anthony@python.org
Python Release Manager
(on behalf of the entire python-dev team)
From mike at pcblokes.com  Fri Jul  9 16:05:20 2004
From: mike at pcblokes.com (Voidspace)
Date: Fri Jul  9 16:08:50 2004
Subject: [ANN] approx - Python CGI Proxy, ConfigObj Update, Guestbook Update
 etc
Message-ID: <40EEA620.7030002@pcblokes.com>

There have been various updates to the Voidspace Python Utils.
Available from :
http://www.voidspace.org.uk/atlantibots/pythonutils.html

*NEW* approx.py Version 1.0.0
Python CGI-proxy.
A CGI-proxy for browsing the web in a restricted or censored 
environment. Will remotely fetch the pages for you. Similar in concept 
to the jmarshall perl proxy - though nothing like as fully featured yet. 
Trial version online to test. Modifies urls in the page so that images, 
stylesheets etc are also fetched through the proxy. Doesn't yet handle 
forms very well but functioning amd can handle authentication. Will use 
the ClientCookie module for cookie handling if it's available 
(authentication without cookie handling is generally useless).

*NEW* listquote module Version 1.0.0
This module contains a set of functions for parsing values from text 
files and writing them back out again. It replaces the lineparse and 
csv_s modules. If you want a dead simple, bog-standard CSV module you 
could do worse than this one.. The function to read in lists is used by 
ConfigObj and has lots of functionality without being complicated.
It will :

    * Appropriately quote and unquote individual elements
    * Read in lists, including nested lists
          o Comma seperated
          o Between '[..]'
          o Between '(...)'
    * Straightforwardly read CSV files
    * Straightforwardly write CSV files


*UPDATE* ConfigObj Version 3.10
This now uses the listquote module for reading in keywords with lists of 
values. Much more flexible.

*UPDATE* guestbook Version 1.1.0
This can now email the guestbook owner when a new entry is made.


Also updates/bugfixes to the orderedDict module and FSDM filestruct 
module (used by DirWatcher).

Licensing
I'm in the process of 'relicensing' all my code available on this page. 
I still retain full copyright - but you are free to use, modify and 
relicense the code. This is effective immediately but it will take a 
while to update the text in all of my modules.

Regards,

Fuzzyman

-- 

http://www.Voidspace.org.uk 
The Place where headspace meets cyberspace. Online resource site - covering science, technology, computing, cyberpunk, psychology, spirituality, fiction and more. 

---
http://www.Voidspace.org.uk/atlantibots/pythonutils.html
Python utilities, modules and apps.
Including Nanagram, Dirwatcher and more.
---
http://www.fuchsiashockz.co.uk   
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/void-shockz
---

Everyone has talent. What is rare is the courage to follow talent
 to the dark place where it leads. -Erica Jong
Ambition is a poor excuse for not having sense enough to be lazy.
         -Milan Kundera



From davidf at sjsoft.com  Thu Jul  8 19:52:12 2004
From: davidf at sjsoft.com (David Fraser)
Date: Sun Jul 11 16:31:22 2004
Subject: [ANN] libgmail 0.0.3 -- Gmail access via Python
In-Reply-To: <mailman.111.1089282664.5135.python-announce-list@python.org>
References: <mailman.111.1089282664.5135.python-announce-list@python.org>
Message-ID: <cck1hs$42r$1@ctb-nnrp2.saix.net>

Follower wrote:
> libgmail -- Python binding for Google's Gmail service
> 
> <http://libgmail.sf.net/>
> 
> The `libgmail` project is a pure Python binding to provide access to
> Google's Gmail web-mail service.
> 
> The library currently ships with one demonstration utility to archive
> messages from a Gmail account into mbox files, suitable for importing
> into a local email client.
> 
> License: GPL 2.0
> 
> Major changes since 0.0.1 & 0.0.2:
> 
>   * Archive Gmail to mbox utility.
> 
>   * No longer requires external ClientCookie package.
> 
>   * Uses constants extracted directly from Gmail Javascript,
>     and includes utility to repeat the process if required.
> 
>   * Code & API refactoring.
> 
>   * Lazy retrieval and caching of thread and message data.
> 
>   * Sourceforge project & home page.
> 
> 
> <p><a href="http://libgmail.sf.net/">libgmail 0.0.3</a> - The
> `libgmail` project is a pure Python binding to provide access to
> Google's Gmail web-mail service. (08-Jul-04)</p>


This is getting really cool. One suggestion: the example on the home 
page needs a libgmail in front of the GmailAccount constructor

I couldn't work out how to get the gmail.js required to update the 
constants.py. Maybe being able to give username and password to 
mkconstants to let it fetch the javascript would be a good idea?

Cheers
David
From gansevle at mamba.cs.utwente.nl  Fri Jul  9 12:00:51 2004
From: gansevle at mamba.cs.utwente.nl (Fred Gansevles)
Date: Sun Jul 11 16:34:01 2004
Subject: ANN: wreg-1.2.2
Message-ID: <20040709100052.3F66950D2F@mamba.cs.utwente.nl>

What is it?
===========

wreg is a module implementing functions to access and manipulate the
Windows Registry. The main goal is to simplify both the substring notation
for registry keys an the access to registry data.


What's new in version 1.2.2?
============================

* removed 'Regedit' from the __all__ list

* added 'Reg' to the __all__ list

* Pseudo Registry code completely rewritten so you can use both 'Registry'
  instances and 'RegObject' instances on a windows platform.

* changed the __repr__ so printing a key doesn't print all it's
  subkeys and values ('pydoc wreg' now works correctly on windows)

Where can I get it?
===================

wreg is located at
http://www.ewi.utwente.nl/~gansevle/python/wreg-1.2.2.zip


Have Fun!
____________________________________________________________________________
 Fred Gansevles <mailto:Fred.Gansevles@ewi.utwente.nl> Phone: +31 53 489 4613
 Org.: Twente University, Fac. of EWI, Box 217, 7500 AE Enschede, Netherlands
    "Linux is like a wigwam, No windows, no gates and an apache inside"
From theller at python.net  Fri Jul  9 21:25:09 2004
From: theller at python.net (Thomas Heller)
Date: Sun Jul 11 16:34:39 2004
Subject: py2exe 0.5.2 released
Message-ID: <wu1dm19m.fsf@python.net>


**py2exe 0.5.2** released
=========================

py2exe is a Python distutils extension which converts python scripts
into executable windows programs, able to run without requiring a
python installation.  Console and Windows (GUI) applications, windows
NT services, exe and dll COM servers are supported.

This is a bugfix release.
    
    * Print a message explaining what's going on whan a service
      exe is started from the command line.

    * py2exe did build invalid version resources, they didn't show up
      correctly on Win98 at least.  Patch by Roger Upole.

    * Fix a buffer overflow in the C code.  Patch by Ralf Sieger, closes
      bug item #893310

    * py2exe now (again) has a builtin list of dlls which should never be
      distributed

    * Patch sys.winver in the distributed pythonXY.dll, so that there is
      no possibility of conflicts with existing distributions and the
      registry keys found there.  Patch by Mark Hammond.

    * Fix several problems when an exception in a 'windows' exe occurs.

    * Include a workaround for unbounded recursion in modulefinder when
      Jason Jorendorff's path module is installed
      See also http://python.org/sf/876278

    * Fix problems when package_dir is set in the setup script,
      see http://tinyurl.com/yuc5l

    * py2exe can now be built from the sources with mingw32

    * py2exe does now handle precompile .pyo and .pyc files (patch by
      Shane Holloway)

    * Fix a problem when the exe's directory contains single quotes

    * Register service dependencies when installing a service

    * Return an exit code of 255 from the exe when there's an uncatched
      exception running the main script.

    * Print a warning instead of failing to build with weird version numbers.
      Suggested by Cory Dodt.

Homepage:

    <http://starship.python.net/crew/theller/py2exe>

Download from the usual location:

    <http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=15583>

Enjoy,

Thomas
From csad7 at t-online.de  Sat Jul 10 13:26:32 2004
From: csad7 at t-online.de (c.)
Date: Sun Jul 11 16:35:25 2004
Subject: ANN: pyXSLdoc 0.66
Message-ID: <40EFD268.4040901@cdot.de>

what is it
----------
An application to produce documentation for XSLT files in XHTML format, 
similar to what javadoc does for Java files.

changes since the last release
------------------------------
Mainly bugfixes. Additionally the template priority is processed and 
displayed now.
See http://cthedot.de/pyxsldoc/README.txt for a complete list of changes.


download
--------
download pyXSLdoc v0.66 - 040710 from http://cthedot.de/pyxsldoc/

pyXSLdoc needs
* Python 2.3 (tested with Python 2.3.4 on Windows XP only)
* Pyana (tested with Pyana 0.9.1 only)
* Docutils (tested with Docutils 0.3 only)


usage
-----
Copy the XSLT files to document in a directory below pyXSLdoc (you could 
also give the complete path to your files but that would end up like 
that in the documentation). Then start the documentation process with

 >python xsldoc.py DIRNAMES FILENAMES [options]

DIRNAMES
     directories with XSLT files to document,e.g. dir1 dir2
All directories and XSLT files below a given directory will be 
processed, so you can just use your XSLT package main directory name or 
use option -s.
FILENAMES
     single XSLT files to document, e.g. file1.xsl path/file2.xsl

options
~~~~~~~
-sSOURCEPATH, --sourcepath=SOURCEPATH
      sourcepath to XSLTs, all XSLT files under this path will be 
documented and ``$SOURCEPATH/doctitle.txt`` and 
``$SOURCEPATH/overview.txt`` will be used for the overview. 
Alternatively you might also simply list all dirs and XSLT files to 
document.
-j, --javadoc, --htmldocs
     process comments in Javadoc style (XHTML and @tags). Default is 
reStructuredText (ReST).

-dDOCPATH, --docpath=DOCPATH
     documentation target directory. Default is ``./_xsldoc``

--windowtitle=WINDOWTITLE
     browser window title for the documentation. Text only, no markup.
--doctitle=DOCTITLE
     show the contents of this ReST .txt file at the top of the overview 
page. Default is ``$SOURCEPATH/doctitle.txt``. If ommitted or no file is 
found, WINDOWTITLETEXT is used.
-oOVERVIEW, --overview=OVERVIEW
     show the contents of this ReST .txt file on the overview page. 
Default is ``$SOURCEPATH/overview.txt``
--helpfile=HELPFILE
     show the information of this ReST .txt file on the help page. 
Default is ``./HELP.txt``.
--encoding=ENCODING
      encoding of additional documenting ReST files (HELP.txt, 
doctitle.txt, overview.txt, directory.txt etc.). Default is utf-8. 
(Encoding of XSLT files and comments in these is of course read from the 
XSLT file itself.)

-r, --removedocs
     remove all comments from given XSLTs and save results in 
COMMENTSTRIPPEDPATH. Present files will be OVERWRITTEN!
-cCOMMENTSTRIPPEDPATH, --commentstrippedpath=COMMENTSTRIPPEDPATH
     path where XSLTs will be saved after removing of all docs. Only 
used when option ``--removedocs`` is given. Default directory is 
``./_optimized``.

-v, --verbose
     show more detailed information while generating the documentation


thanks for the interest. any comment is appreciated
christof hoeke
pyxsldoc a t   c the dot . de
http://cthedot.de



<P><A HREF="http://cthedot.de/pyxsldoc/">pyXSLdoc 0.66</A> - generate 
XSLT documentation (10-Jul-04)


From tom.sheffler at sbcglobal.net  Sat Jul 10 22:14:44 2004
From: tom.sheffler at sbcglobal.net (tom.sheffler@sbcglobal.net)
Date: Sun Jul 11 16:36:07 2004
Subject: ANN: Python as a test and modeling language for Verilog
Message-ID: <U6YHc.89711$Xg3.24175@newssvr29.news.prodigy.com>

Oroboro is an approach to integrating Python and Verilog. With it, Python generator functions are used to model simulation threads in a cooperative multitasking style. An Oroboro task can suspend its execution with a yield statement that lists the reasons the task should be resumed. Typical reasons map directly to VPI callback reasons. Oroboro does not implement a scheduler of its own, rather, it relies on Verilog for all event scheduling through the use of callback functions. 
A short example illustrates some basic capabilities for interacting with a Verilog simulation. 

  from oroboro import *

  def watcher(sig):
    print "Watching signal %s" % sig
    while 1:

      yield sigchange(sig), timeout(10)

      if isinstance(currentreason(), sigchange):
        print "New value for signal %s is %s" % (sig, sig.get())

      if isinstance(currentreason(), timeout):
        print "Timeout has elapsed.  Wait again."


  def main(systf):

    s = signal("top.mysignal")
    t = task(watcher, s)

    yield timeout(0)
    returnThe example above illustrates a simple task that watches a Verilog signal. The task 'watcher' loops indefinitely, suspending its execution with a yield statement that lists the reasons it should be resumed. Here, the task waits until either the signal value changes, or a 10 simulation tick timeout occurs ... whichever comes first. When the task resumes, it uses the 'currentreason' function to determine whether the first or second reason in the yield statement was triggered. The task prints an informative message and then loops. 

Source downloads and documentation can be found at:

  http://apvm.sourceforge.net


-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-announce-list/attachments/20040710/6c2ac198/attachment.html
From greg at cosc.canterbury.ac.nz  Sun Jul 11 10:04:35 2004
From: greg at cosc.canterbury.ac.nz (greg)
Date: Sun Jul 11 16:36:07 2004
Subject: ANN: Pyrex 0.9.3
Message-ID: <40F0F493.3030401@cosc.canterbury.ac.nz>

Pyrex 0.9.3 is now available:

   http://www.cosc.canterbury.ac.nz/~greg/python/Pyrex/

Highlights of this version:

   - Types defined with a ctypedef in a 'cdef extern from' block
     are now referred to by the typedef name in generated C code,
     so it is no longer necessary to match the type in the C
     header file exactly.

   - Some bugs introduced by the recent changes to the handling
     of string literals have been fixed.

Plus several other enhancements and bug fixes -- see the
CHANGES file in the distribution for details.


What is Pyrex?
--------------

Pyrex is a new language for writing Python extension modules.
It lets you freely mix operations on Python and C data, with
all Python reference counting and error checking handled
automatically.

From rlbuvel at gmail.com  Sun Jul 11 13:24:26 2004
From: rlbuvel at gmail.com (Ray Buvel)
Date: Sun Jul 11 16:36:08 2004
Subject: [ANN] crcmod - CRC generator
Message-ID: <38b79e61.0407110324.6c4bdb9b@posting.google.com>

Python module for creating functions computing the Cyclic Redundancy Check
(CRC). Any generating polynomial producing 8, 16, 32, or 64 bit CRCs is
allowed. Generated functions can be used in Python or C/C++ source code can
be generated.

Visit the project home page at  http://crcmod.sourceforge.net/
From follower at gmail.com  Sun Jul 11 14:13:02 2004
From: follower at gmail.com (Follower)
Date: Sun Jul 11 16:36:08 2004
Subject: [ANN] libgmail 0.0.5 -- Gmail access via Python
Message-ID: <3c18c08f.0407110413.464f6ae5@posting.google.com>

libgmail -- Python binding for Google's Gmail service

<http://libgmail.sf.net/>

The `libgmail` project is a pure Python binding to provide access to
Google's Gmail web-mail service.

The library currently ships with one demonstration utility to archive
messages from a Gmail account into mbox files, suitable for importing
into a local email client.

License: GPL 2.0

Major changes since 0.0.4:

 * Added functionality to enable message sending.
 
 * Added command line example to send a message.


<p><a href="http://libgmail.sf.net/">libgmail 0.0.5</a> - The
`libgmail` project is a pure Python binding to provide access to
Google's Gmail web-mail service. (11-Jul-04)</p>
From pje at telecommunity.com  Mon Jul 12 19:58:30 2004
From: pje at telecommunity.com (Phillip J. Eby)
Date: Mon Jul 12 19:57:36 2004
Subject: PyProtocols 0.9.3 Release Candidate 2
Message-ID: <5.1.1.6.0.20040712135628.01ee8600@mail.telecommunity.com>

PyProtocols 0.9.3 release candidate 2 is now available for 
download.  Assuming there are no bugs reported in the next 3-4 weeks, it 
will become the 0.9.3 final release in early August.  (The 0.9.3rc2 
revision fixes a bug in the '--without-speedups' version of 0.9.3rc1, as 
reported by Matthew Scott.)


What is PyProtocols?
--------------------

PyProtocols is an extended implementation of PEP 246, adding a new 
"declaration  API" that lets you easily define your own interfaces and 
adapters, and declare what adapters should be used to adapt what types, 
objects, or interfaces.  Using PyProtocols, you can easily make flexible 
frameworks that you or other developers can extend without needing to 
modify the base framework.  PyProtocols interfaces can interoperate with 
those of Twisted and Zope, or can be used entirely standalone.

PyProtocols may be used, modified, and distributed under the same terms and 
conditions as Python or Zope.


What's new in version 0.9.3rc1? (Highlights)
--------------------------------------------

* Adapter factories can now accept just one argument, the way Twisted and 
Zope adapters do.

* Interface and protocol objects can be called, as a shortcut for 'adapt()' 
(as Zope and Twisted interfaces do)

* You can now more easily install PyProtocols without a C compiler, using 
the '--without-speedups' option to 'setup.py' (see the README.txt file for 
details.)

* Numerous other bug fixes and enhancements - see CHANGES.txt for details.

IMPORTANT: If you are upgrading from a previous version of PyProtocols, 
please read UPGRADING.txt for important information.  Certain rarely-used 
features have been deprecated, and others have changed slightly.  Most 
users should not experience any problems (except perhaps for 
DeprecationWarnings), but please be sure to verify this before you upgrade 
any production code from 0.9.2 to 0.9.3.


PyProtocols Resources
---------------------

* Upgrading to PyProtocols 0.9.3 (and a look ahead to 1.0)
    http://peak.telecommunity.com/protocol_api/UPGRADING.txt.html

* Detailed Changes for all releases:
    http://peak.telecommunity.com/protocol_api/CHANGES.txt.html

* Release notes, installation instructions, and browsable API docs:
    http://peak.telecommunity.com/protocol_api/

* Source and Binary Releases:
    http://peak.telecommunity.com/dist/

* Reference Manual (HTML):
    http://peak.telecommunity.com/protocol_ref/module-protocols.html

* Reference Manual (PDF):
    http://peak.telecommunity.com/protocol_ref.pdf

* Browsable CVS Repository:
    http://cvs.eby-sarna.com/PyProtocols/ 

From python-url at phaseit.net  Mon Jul 12 20:48:43 2004
From: python-url at phaseit.net (Peter Otten)
Date: Mon Jul 12 20:51:48 2004
Subject: Dr. Dobb's Python-URL! - weekly Python news and links (Jul 12)
Message-ID: <E1Bk5r1-000584-Hs@lairds.us>

QOTW: "Python's a language you can swear by, not at." - Chris

"Every sufficiently advanced LISP application will eventually reimplement
Python." - Hodgson's Law


    Chad Himeda asks for a nested loop limit and Peter Hansen answers
    with a quick test on the commandline. A discussion on the merits of
    code approaching this limit entrails.
        http://groups.google.com/groups?threadm=fd07865f.0407071045.16e20c84%40posting.google.com
    
    Karl Pech wants to calculate PI using the Monte Carlo method - and fast.
        http://groups.google.com/groups?threadm=ccke8p%24c0h%2406%241%40news.t-online.com
    
    Chris recollects how he fell in love with Python.
        http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=mailman.138.1089318827.5135.python-list%40python.org
    
    Marco Aschwanden asks for opinions on the use of multiple return
    statements in a single function.
        http://groups.google.com/groups?threadm=mailman.158.1089358188.5135.python-list%40python.org
    
    Bryan Olson searches for the longest matching prefix of a string using
    regular expressions. Michael Hudson offers an alternate approach.
        http://groups.google.com/groups?threadm=gN5Hc.12587%24ia1.1667%40newssvr27.news.prodigy.com
    
    Contrary to the current documentation, the open() builtin is not
    retained for compatibility only. It may even grow some extra logic and
    no longer be confined to ordinary files.
        http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2004-July/045931.html
    
    Guido van Rossum is less concerned about variable names shading
    builtins than many posters on c.l.py.
        http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2004-July/045948.html
    
    Anthony Baxter announces release of the first alpha version of
    Python 2.4. You are invited to download and participate in the test.
        http://groups.google.com/groups?threadm=mailman.157.1089357112.5135.python-list%40python.org
    

========================================================================
Everything Python-related you want is probably one or two clicks away in
these pages:

    Python.org's Python Language Website is the traditional
    center of Pythonia
        http://www.python.org
    Notice especially the master FAQ
        http://www.python.org/doc/FAQ.html

    PythonWare complements the digest you're reading with the
    marvelous daily python url
         http://www.pythonware.com/daily  
    Mygale is a news-gathering webcrawler that specializes in (new)
    World-Wide Web articles related to Python.
         http://www.awaretek.com/nowak/mygale.html 
    While cosmetically similar, Mygale and the Daily Python-URL
    are utterly different in their technologies and generally in
    their results.

    comp.lang.python.announce announces new Python software.  Be
    sure to scan this newsgroup weekly.
        http://groups.google.com/groups?oi=djq&as_ugroup=comp.lang.python.announce

    Brett Cannon continues the marvelous tradition established by 
    Andrew Kuchling and Michael Hudson of intelligently summarizing
    action on the python-dev mailing list once every other week.
	http://www.python.org/dev/summary/

    The Python Package Index catalogues packages.
        http://www.python.org/pypi/

    The somewhat older Vaults of Parnassus ambitiously collects references
    to all sorts of Python resources.
        http://www.vex.net/~x/parnassus/   

    Much of Python's real work takes place on Special-Interest Group
    mailing lists
        http://www.python.org/sigs/

    The Python Business Forum "further[s] the interests of companies
    that base their business on ... Python."
	http://www.python-in-business.org

    The Python Software Foundation (PSF) has replaced the Python
    Consortium as an independent nexus of activity.  It has official
    responsibility for Python's development and maintenance. 
        http://www.python.org/psf/
    Among the ways you can support PSF is with a donation.
        http://www.python.org/psf/donate.html

    Cetus collects Python hyperlinks.
        http://www.cetus-links.org/oo_python.html

    Python FAQTS
        http://python.faqts.com/

    The Cookbook is a collaborative effort to capture useful and
    interesting recipes.
	http://aspn.activestate.com/ASPN/Cookbook/Python

    Among several Python-oriented RSS/RDF feeds available are
	http://www.python.org/channews.rdf
	http://bootleg-rss.g-blog.net/pythonware_com_daily.pcgi
	http://python.de/backend.php
    For more, see
	http://www.syndic8.com/feedlist.php?ShowMatch=python&ShowStatus=all
    The old Python "To-Do List" now lives principally in a
    SourceForge reincarnation.
        http://sourceforge.net/tracker/?atid=355470&group_id=5470&func=browse
        http://python.sourceforge.net/peps/pep-0042.html
     
    The online Python Journal is posted at pythonjournal.cognizor.com.
    editor@pythonjournal.com and editor@pythonjournal.cognizor.com
    welcome submission of material that helps people's understanding
    of Python use, and offer Web presentation of your work.

    *Py: the Journal of the Python Language*
        http://www.pyzine.com

    Archive probing tricks of the trade:
        http://groups.google.com/groups?oi=djq&as_ugroup=comp.lang.python&num=100
        http://groups.google.com/groups?meta=site%3Dgroups%26group%3Dcomp.lang.python.*

Previous - (U)se the (R)esource, (L)uke! - messages are listed here:
  http://www.ddj.com/topics/pythonurl/         
  http://purl.org/thecliff/python/url.html (dormant)
or
  http://groups.google.com/groups?oi=djq&as_q=+Python-URL!&as_ugroup=comp.lang.python


Suggestions/corrections for next week's posting are always welcome.
E-mail to <Python-URL@phaseit.net> should get through.

To receive a new issue of this posting in e-mail each Monday morning
(approximately), ask <claird@phaseit.net> to subscribe.  Mention
"Python-URL!".


-- The Python-URL! Team--

Dr. Dobb's Journal (http://www.ddj.com) is pleased to participate in and
sponsor the "Python-URL!" project.
From eric at enthought.com  Wed Jul 14 07:07:42 2004
From: eric at enthought.com (eric jones)
Date: Wed Jul 14 13:04:40 2004
Subject: ANN: Reminder -- SciPy 04 is coming up
Message-ID: <40F4BF9E.8060103@enthought.com>

Hey folks,

Just a reminder that SciPy 04 is coming up.  More information is here:

http://www.scipy.org/wikis/scipy04

About the Conference and Keynote Speaker
---------------------------------------------
The 1st annual *SciPy Conference* will be held this year at Caltech, 
September 2-3, 2004.  As some of you may know, we've experienced great 
participation in two SciPy "Workshops" (with ~70 attendees in both 2002 
and 2003) and this year we're graduating to a "conference."  With the 
prestige of a conference comes the responsibility of a keynote address.  
This year, Jim Hugunin has answered the call and will be speaking to 
kickoff the meeting on Thursday September 2nd.  Jim is the creator of 
Numeric Python, Jython, and co-designer of AspectJ. Jim is currently 
working on IronPython--a fast implementation of Python for .NET and Mono.

Presenters
-----------
We still have room for a few more standard talks, and there is plenty of 
room for lightning talks. Because of this, we are extending the abstract 
deadline until July 23rd.  Please send your abstract to 
abstracts@scipy.org.  Travis Oliphant is organizing the presentations 
this year. (Thanks!)  Once accepted, papers and/or presentation slides 
are acceptable and are due by August 20, 2004. 

Registration
-------------
Early registration ($100.00) has been extended to July 23rd.  Follow the 
links off of the main conference site:

http://www.scipy.org/wikis/scipy04

After July 23rd, registration will be $150.00.  Registration includes 
breakfast and lunch Thursday & Friday and a very nice dinner Thursday 
night.  Please register as soon as possible as it will help us in 
planning for food, room sizes, etc.

Sprints
--------
As of now, we really haven't had much of a call for coding sprints for 
the 3 days prior to SciPy 04.  Below is the original announcement about 
sprints.  If you would like to suggest a topic and see if others are 
interested, please send a message to the list.  Otherwise, we'll forgo 
the sprints session this year.

    We're also planning three days of informal "Coding Sprints" prior to
    the conference -- August 30 to September 1, 2004.  Conference
    registration is not required to participate in the sprints.  Please
    email the list, however, if you plan to attend.  Topics for these
    sprints will be determined via the mailing lists as well, so please
    submit any suggestions for topics to the scipy-user list:

    list signup: http://www.scipy.org/mailinglists/
    list address: scipy-user@scipy.org


thanks,
eric

From falted at pytables.org  Tue Jul 13 11:22:27 2004
From: falted at pytables.org (Francesc Alted)
Date: Wed Jul 14 13:05:08 2004
Subject: PyTables 0.8.1 released
Message-ID: <200407131122.27056.falted@pytables.org>

Hi!,

I'm pleased to announce the availability of PyTables 0.8.1.

PyTables is a hierarchical database package designed to efficiently
manage very large amounts of data. PyTables is built on top of the
HDF5 library and the numarray package. It features an object-oriented
interface that, combined with natural naming and C-code generated from
Pyrex sources, makes it a fast, yet extremely easy-to-use tool for
interactively saving and retrieving different kinds of datasets. It
also provides flexible indexed access on disk to anywhere in the data.

The primary purpose of this release is to incorporate updates to
related to the newly released numarray 1.0. I've taken the opportunity
to backport some improvements added in PyTables 0.9 (in alpha stage)
as well as to fix the known problems.

Improvements:

- The logic for computing the buffer sizes has been revamped. As a
  consequence, the performance of writing/reading tables with large
  row sizes has improved by a factor of ten or more, now exceeding 70
  MB/s for writing and 130 MB/s for reading (using compression). See
  http://sf.net/mailarchive/forum.php?thread_id=4963045&forum_id=13760
  for more info.

- The maximum row size for tables has been raised to 512 KB
  (before it was 8 KB, due to some internal limitations)

- Documentation has been improved in minor details. As a result of a
  fix in the underlying documentation system (tbook), chapters start
  now at odd pages, instead of even. So those of you who want to print
  to double side probably will have better luck now when aligning
  pages ;).  Another one is that HTML documentation has improved its
  look as well.

Bug Fixes:

- Indexing of Arrays with list or tuple flavors (#968131)
  When retrieving single elements from an array with 'List' or
  'Tuple' flavors, an error occurred. This has been
  corrected and now you can retrieve fileh.root.array[2] without
  problems for 'List' or 'Tuple' flavored (E, VL)Arrays.
  
- Iterators on Arrays with list or tuple flavors fail (#968132)
  When using iterators with Array objects with 'List' or
  'Tuple' flavors, an error occurred. This has been
  corrected.

- Last Index (-1) of Arrays doesn't work (#968149)
  When accessing to the last element in an Array using the notation
  -1, an empty list (or tuple or array) is returned instead of the
  proper value. This happened in general with all negative
  indices. Fixed.

- Table.read(flavor="List") should return pure lists (#972534)
  However, it used to return a pointer to numarray.records.Record
  instances, as in:

   >>> fileh.root.table.read(1,2,flavor="List") 
    [<numarray.records.Record instance at 0x4128352c>] 
   >>> fileh.root.table.read(1,3,flavor="List") 
    [<numarray.records.Record instance at 0x4128396c>, 
     <numarray.records.Record instance at 0x41283a8c>] 
 
  Now the next records are returned:

   >>> fileh.root.table.read(1,2, flavor=List) 
    [(' ', 1, 1.0)] 
   >>> fileh.root.table.read(1,3, flavor=List) 
    [(' ', 1, 1.0), 
     (' ', 2, 2.0)] 
 
  In addition, when reading a single row of a table, a
  numarray.records.Record pointer was returned:
 
  >>> fileh.root.table[1] 
   <numarray.records.Record instance at 0x4128398c> 
 
  Now, it returns a tuple:

  >>> fileh.root.table[1] 
   (' ', 1, 1.0) 
 
  Which I think is more consistent, and more Pythonic.

- Copy of leaves fails... (#973370)
  Attempting to copy leaves (Table or Array with different flavors) on
  top of themselves caused an internal error in PyTables. This has
  been corrected by silently avoiding the copy and returning the
  original Leaf as a result.

Minor changes:

- When assigning a value to a non-existing field in a table row, now a
  KeyError is raised, instead of the AttributeError that was issued
  before. I think this is more consistent with the type of error.

- Tests have been improved so as to pass the whole suite when compiled
  in 64 bit mode on a Linux/PowerPC machine (namely a dual-G5 Powermac
  running a 64-bit, 2.6.4 Linux kernel and the preview YDL
  distribution for G5, with 64-bit GCC toolchain). Thanks to Ciro
  Cattuto for testing and reporting the modifications that were
  needed.


Where PyTables can be applied?
------------------------------

PyTables is not designed to work as a relational database competitor,
but rather as a teammate. If you want to work with large datasets of
multidimensional data (for example, for multidimensional analysis), or
just provide a categorized structure for some portions of your cluttered
RDBS, then give PyTables a try. It works well for storing data from data
acquisition systems (DAS), simulation software, network data monitoring
systems (for example, traffic measurements of IP packets on routers),
very large XML files, or for creating a centralized repository for system 
logs, to name only a few possible uses.
 
What is a table?
----------------

A table is defined as a collection of records whose values are stored in
fixed-length fields. All records have the same structure and all values
in each field have the same data type.  The terms "fixed-length" and
"strict data types" seem to be quite a strange requirement for a
language like Python that supports dynamic data types, but they serve a
useful function if the goal is to save very large quantities of data
(such as is generated by many scientific applications, for example) in
an efficient manner that reduces demand on CPU time and I/O resources.

What is HDF5?
-------------

For those people who know nothing about HDF5, it is a general purpose
library and file format for storing scientific data made at NCSA. HDF5
can store two primary objects: datasets and groups. A dataset is
essentially a multidimensional array of data elements, and a group is a
structure for organizing objects in an HDF5 file. Using these two basic
constructs, one can create and store almost any kind of scientific data
structure, such as images, arrays of vectors, and structured and
unstructured grids. You can also mix and match them in HDF5 files
according to your needs.

Platforms
---------

I'm using Linux (Intel 32-bit) as the main development platform, but
PyTables should be easy to compile/install on many other UNIX
machines. This package has also passed all the tests on a UltraSparc
platform with Solaris 7 and Solaris 8. It also compiles and passes all
the tests on a SGI Origin2000 with MIPS R12000 processors, with the
MIPSPro compiler and running IRIX 6.5. It also runs fine on Linux
64-bit platforms, like an AMD Opteron running SuSe Linux Enterprise
Server or PowerPC G5 with Linux 2.6.x in 64bit mode. It has also been
tested in MacOSX platforms (10.2 but should also work on newer
versions).

Regarding Windows platforms, PyTables has been tested with Windows
2000 and Windows XP (using the Microsoft Visual C compiler), but it
should also work with other flavors as well.

An example?
-----------

For online code examples, have a look at

http://pytables.sourceforge.net/html/tut/tutorial1-1.html

and, for newly introduced Variable Length Arrays:

http://pytables.sourceforge.net/html/tut/vlarray2.html

Web site
--------

Go to the PyTables web site for more details:

http://pytables.sourceforge.net/

Share your experience
---------------------

Let me know of any bugs, suggestions, gripes, kudos, etc. you may
have.

Cheers,

-- 
Francesc Alted

From joel at joelburton.com  Tue Jul 13 16:17:40 2004
From: joel at joelburton.com (Joel Burton)
Date: Wed Jul 14 13:05:18 2004
Subject: Upcoming Meetings for Zope/Python Users of Washington, DC
Message-ID: <40F3EF04.3010805@joelburton.com>

The newly-formed Zope/Python Users Group of DC announces our upcoming
meeting schedule:

Mo Jul 19: Zope -- presentation on Archetypes by Joel Burton

Th Aug  5: Python -- no topic yet

Mo Aug 16: Zope -- no topic yet

Th Sep  2: Python -- no topic yet

Mo Sep 20: Zope -- no topic yet

The hot topics that users at the first meeting were most interested in 
include: Plone skinning, Zope/Plone performance, Python + XML, Text 
processing with Python, and Zope development, so expect that we'll fill 
in these topics ASAP with presentations like these.

Our meetings take place at 7pm in the large conference room of Porter 
Novelli,a marketing/communications firm located in downtown DC at 1909 K 
Street (right off the red and orange/blue Metro lines, and close to many
bus lines).

We'll be meeting on the first Thursday and third Monday of each month.
A full schedule of our meetings, talks, and plans are at our web site at 
http://www.zpugdc.org. To receive announcements about upcoming meetings, 
and to contribute to our group, please join our mailing list (send a 
message with the *subject* 'subscribe' to zpugdc@lists.zpugdc.org, or 
sign up at the site.)

If you have questions, you can reach us at info@zpugdc.org.

Thanks!

- j.

Joel Burton, for the Zope/Python Users Group of DC (www.zpugdc.org)
From kiko at async.com.br  Mon Jul 12 21:00:47 2004
From: kiko at async.com.br (Christian Robottom Reis)
Date: Wed Jul 14 13:05:35 2004
Subject: ANNOUNCE: pygtk-0.6.12
Message-ID: <20040712190047.GB12694@async.com.br>


** Note: this is *not* relative to the current GTK+ 2.x-based PyGTK **

Hello there,

    I'm releasing today version 0.6.12 of PyGTK, off the 0.6 branch,
which is the original PyGTK branch based on GTK+ 1.2. 

This version includes a small number of bugfixes and two API additions
which have been incorporated during the last two years of stability.
Summary of changes:

  Bugfixes

    - Fixed GtkScrolledWindow's use of `has_attr'
    - A fix for bug 96907: Crashes when calling emit() with less
      parameters than expected.
    - Check for non-existing directories in pygtk._get_available_versions
    - Implement proper exception handling in the GladeXML constructor.
    - Performance enhancement in bug 112395: Clean up __getattr__ and add 
      __eq__/__nonzero__ to GtkObject. 

  New API

    - Wrapped GtkRadioButton.group()
    - Implemented GtkCList.set_focus_row() to work around a GTK+ focus
      bug in the GtkCList.

Download it from 

    ftp://ftp.gtk.org/pub/gtk/python/v1.2/pygtk-0.6.12.tar.gz

There is no accompanying gnome-python release.  This tarball is
identical to the release candidate that was announced earlier. Thanks
for everyone that provided bug reports, comments and fixes for the
branch, including Jon Nelson, Steve McClure and Andrew Reid. 

Take care,
--
Christian Robottom Reis | http://async.com.br/~kiko/ | [+55 16] 3361 2331
From newsham at lava.net  Fri Jul 16 06:48:28 2004
From: newsham at lava.net (Tim Newsham)
Date: Tue Jul 20 13:46:06 2004
Subject: Announcing PyGgy 0.3
Message-ID: <Pine.BSI.4.58.0407151847450.5274@malasada.lava.net>


Announcing:

PyGgy v0.3 - http://www.lava.net/~newsham/pyggy/
Tim Newsham
2004 Jul 15
Public Domain

---[ Description

PyGgy is a python package for generating parsers and lexers in python.
The PyGgy distribution contains two tools:

    PyLly - (Pronounced "pile-ey") A lexer generator that generates
            DFA tables for lexing tokens.
    PyGgy - (Pronounced "piggy") A parser generator that generates
            SLR tables for a GLR parsing engine.

The PyLly program is used to pregenerate tables for a finite state
machine from a lexer specification.  There is a lexer engine that uses
the tables to tokenize an input stream.

The PyGgy program is used to pregenerate parser tables from a parser
specification.  There is a GLR parsing engine that uses the tables
to parse a stream of input tokens.  Because GLR parsing is used, the
parser can deal with arbitrary grammars, even if they are recursive
or ambiguous.

PyGgy is self hosting -- PyGgy parsers and PyLly lexers are used
to process the specification files used by both PyGgy and PyLly.

This is version 0.3 of PyGgy.  It is the second public release.
This is an alpha release;  the public interfaces are subject to
change, and there may be bugs in the code.  This
version of PyGgy is placed in the public domain.  This means anyone
can do anything with it with no restrictions whatsoever.

From follower at gmail.com  Thu Jul 15 00:32:36 2004
From: follower at gmail.com (Follower)
Date: Tue Jul 20 13:47:10 2004
Subject: ANN: libgmail 0.0.6 - Gmail access via Python - SMTP Proxy enabled!
Message-ID: <3c18c08f.0407141432.4d1076b7@posting.google.com>

libgmail -- Python binding for Google's Gmail service

<http://libgmail.sf.net/>

The `libgmail` project is a pure Python binding to provide access to
Google's Gmail web-mail service.

The library currently ships with a demonstration utility to archive
messages from a Gmail account into mbox files, suitable for importing
into a local email client.

Also includes a demonstration utility that acts as a SMTP proxy to
allow mail to be sent from any standard mail client that uses SMTP
(e.g. Mail.app, Mozilla etc).

License: GPL 2.0

Major changes since 0.0.5:

 * Implemented SMTP proxy to enable Gmail to be send with a
   standard mail client via (E)SMTP.

 * Extended standard SMTP class to handle ESMTP EHLO & AUTH PLAIN commands.

 * Utility function '_retrieveJavascript' to retrieve current version
   of Gmail Javascript file. (By request.)


<p><a href="http://libgmail.sf.net/">libgmail 0.0.6</a> - The
`libgmail` project is a pure Python binding to provide access to
Google's Gmail web-mail service. (15-Jul-04)</p>
From tom.sheffler at sbcglobal.net  Thu Jul 15 05:12:52 2004
From: tom.sheffler at sbcglobal.net (tom.sheffler@sbcglobal.net)
Date: Tue Jul 20 13:47:11 2004
Subject: [ANN] Python as a test and modeling langauge for Verilog
Message-ID: <UCmJc.10537$Xj6.1087@newssvr25.news.prodigy.com>


Oroboro is an approach to using Python as a test and
modeling language for Verilog.  With it, Python generator
functions are used to model simulation threads in a
cooperative multitasking style.  A simulation task in Python
can suspend its execution with a yield statement that lists
the reasons the task should be resumed. Typical reasons map
directly to VPI callback reasons. Oroboro does not implement
a scheduler of its own, rather, it relies on Verilog for all
event scheduling through the use of callback functions.  A
short example illustrates some basic capabilities for
interacting with a Verilog simulation.

  from oroboro import *

  def watcher(sig):
    print "Watching signal %s" % sig
    while 1:

      yield sigchange(sig), timeout(10)

      if isinstance(currentreason(), sigchange):
        print "New value for signal %s is %s" % (sig, sig.get())

      if isinstance(currentreason(), timeout):
        print "Timeout has elapsed.  Wait again."


  def main(systf):

    s = signal("top.mysignal")
    t = task(watcher, s)

    yield timeout(0)


The example above illustrates a simple task that watches a
Verilog signal. The task 'watcher' loops indefinitely,
suspending its execution with a yield statement that lists
the reasons it should be resumed. Here, the task waits until
either the signal value changes, or a 10 simulation tick
timeout occurs ... whichever comes first. When the task
resumes, it uses the 'currentreason' function to determine
whether the first or second reason in the yield statement
was triggered. The task prints an informative message and
then loops.

A longer paper discussing Oroboro, source downloads and
examples can be found at:

  http://apvm.sourceforge.net



From martin at v.loewis.de  Sun Jul 18 12:13:03 2004
From: martin at v.loewis.de (=?ISO-8859-1?Q?=22Martin_v=2E_L=F6wis=22?=)
Date: Tue Jul 20 13:47:12 2004
Subject: utf8script 1.0 is released
Message-ID: <40fa4d2f$0$26137$9b622d9e@news.freenet.de>

The package utf8script provides an additional binary format for Linux:
scripts which start with an UTF-8 signature (aka BOM), i.e.  with the
byte sequence \xef\xbb\xbf#!.

This is particularly useful for scripting languages which recognize
the BOM, e.g. Python. With Python 2.3 or newer, scripts with the UTF-8
BOM are considered UTF-8 enocded without the need for an addition
encoding declaration.

The package is available from

http://www.dcl.hpi.uni-potsdam.de/home/loewis/utf8script-1.0.tgz

An x86 Debian package can be downloaded from

http://www.dcl.hpi.uni-potsdam.de/home/loewis/debian/binary/utf8script_1.0-1_i386.deb

Martin v. L?wis
martin@v.loewis.de

From jolsen at despammed.com  Sun Jul 18 18:41:57 2004
From: jolsen at despammed.com (Jesper Olsen)
Date: Tue Jul 20 13:47:12 2004
Subject: ANN: PChess 0.9
Message-ID: <e9ece60a.0407180841.5515ddcf@posting.google.com>

Hi,

I don't know if the world needs another chess program, but here is one :-)

http://jesperolsen.net/PChess/index.html

It is a C-extension for python, and includes a cgi based chess application:

http://jesperolsen.net/PChess/cgiskak.py

The chess engine itself, is one I wrote a long time ago, and now I have updated
it (for ANSI C) and created a python wrapper for it.

I am planning a few more releases - adding features to the python interface.
I have previously written GUIs for it, but they don't seem to last very long
before becomming obsolete.
I'm not going to do another - in addition to the CGI game, but may try to
interface it to an existing one.

If you are aware of a good candidate - particularly if it has a python 
interface and is relatively platform independent, I am interested.

Cheers
Jesper
From python-url at phaseit.net  Mon Jul 19 17:21:04 2004
From: python-url at phaseit.net (Peter Otten)
Date: Tue Jul 20 13:47:13 2004
Subject: Dr. Dobb's Python-URL! - weekly Python news and links (Jul 19)
Message-ID: <E1BmZwu-0005iK-QX@lairds.us>

QOTW:  "So I better start practice my throwing, and Dan [Sugalski] better
start practice his ducking. ;-)" -- Guido van Rossum using his time-machine
for a preview on the Pie-thon at Oscon 2004.

"Anytime you need to do something on corresponding items in two lists, you
should think of zip(), as this binds the matching elements together." --
Marc Boeren


    Michele Simionato shows a concise way to implement a revolving
    counter.
        http://groups.google.com/groups?threadm=4edc17eb.0407180632.14385359%40posting.google.com
    
    In his answer to Chris Lyon, Daniel Dittmar posts a mini-tutorial on
    list comprehensions and iterators.
        http://groups.google.com/groups?threadm=cd0pse%24q2g%241%40news1.wdf.sap-ag.de
    
    Mike C. Fletcher shares his experiences in building Python extensions
    with the free (of charge) Microsoft Visual C++ Toolkit compiler.
        http://groups.google.com/groups?threadm=mailman.528.1090097933.5135.python-list%40python.org
        http://members.rogers.com/mcfletch/programming/mstoolkit/
    
    Python newbie Matt Feinstein misses fixed-size integers in the core.
    While answers point out that this will not be problem in practice,
    Dan Bishop has a pure-python implementation to ease the (phantom?)
    pain.
        http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=ad052e5c.0407161348.42abb996%40posting.google.com
    
    Jacek Generowicz explains Python's scoping rules, and yes, he has a
    not so hidden agenda.
        http://groups.google.com/groups?threadm=tyfwu15v85j.fsf%40pcepsft001.cern.ch
    
    David Pokorny wants to run a function a fixed number of bytecodes at
    a time. It turns out that a similar problem has already been discussed
    a year ago - with impressive code posted by Duncan Booth.
        http://groups.google.com/groups?threadm=40FA9D2A.3020905%40hotmail.com
    
    Python Windows guru Mark Hammond needs beta-testers with IIS and
    Apache experience for a new ISAPI module.
        http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=cdf3mb%2418b0%241%40arachne.labyrinth.net.au
    
    Heiko Wundram engages in a discussion about the algorithm used in his
    little Minesweeper program.
        http://groups.google.com/groups?threadm=mailman.326.1089751896.5135.python-list%40python.org
    
    What is Pie-thon? For an explanation see
        http://www.artima.com/forums/flat.jsp?forum=122&thread=27898


========================================================================
Everything Python-related you want is probably one or two clicks away in
these pages:

    Python.org's Python Language Website is the traditional
    center of Pythonia
        http://www.python.org
    Notice especially the master FAQ
        http://www.python.org/doc/FAQ.html

    PythonWare complements the digest you're reading with the
    marvelous daily python url
         http://www.pythonware.com/daily  
    Mygale is a news-gathering webcrawler that specializes in (new)
    World-Wide Web articles related to Python.
         http://www.awaretek.com/nowak/mygale.html 
    While cosmetically similar, Mygale and the Daily Python-URL
    are utterly different in their technologies and generally in
    their results.

    comp.lang.python.announce announces new Python software.  Be
    sure to scan this newsgroup weekly.
        http://groups.google.com/groups?oi=djq&as_ugroup=comp.lang.python.announce

    Brett Cannon continues the marvelous tradition established by 
    Andrew Kuchling and Michael Hudson of intelligently summarizing
    action on the python-dev mailing list once every other week.
	http://www.python.org/dev/summary/

    The Python Package Index catalogues packages.
        http://www.python.org/pypi/

    The somewhat older Vaults of Parnassus ambitiously collects references
    to all sorts of Python resources.
        http://www.vex.net/~x/parnassus/   

    Much of Python's real work takes place on Special-Interest Group
    mailing lists
        http://www.python.org/sigs/

    The Python Business Forum "further[s] the interests of companies
    that base their business on ... Python."
	http://www.python-in-business.org

    The Python Software Foundation (PSF) has replaced the Python
    Consortium as an independent nexus of activity.  It has official
    responsibility for Python's development and maintenance. 
        http://www.python.org/psf/
    Among the ways you can support PSF is with a donation.
        http://www.python.org/psf/donate.html

    Cetus collects Python hyperlinks.
        http://www.cetus-links.org/oo_python.html

    Python FAQTS
        http://python.faqts.com/

    The Cookbook is a collaborative effort to capture useful and
    interesting recipes.
	http://aspn.activestate.com/ASPN/Cookbook/Python

    Among several Python-oriented RSS/RDF feeds available are
	http://www.python.org/channews.rdf
	http://bootleg-rss.g-blog.net/pythonware_com_daily.pcgi
	http://python.de/backend.php
    For more, see
	http://www.syndic8.com/feedlist.php?ShowMatch=python&ShowStatus=all
    The old Python "To-Do List" now lives principally in a
    SourceForge reincarnation.
        http://sourceforge.net/tracker/?atid=355470&group_id=5470&func=browse
        http://python.sourceforge.net/peps/pep-0042.html
     
    The online Python Journal is posted at pythonjournal.cognizor.com.
    editor@pythonjournal.com and editor@pythonjournal.cognizor.com
    welcome submission of material that helps people's understanding
    of Python use, and offer Web presentation of your work.

    *Py: the Journal of the Python Language*
        http://www.pyzine.com

    Archive probing tricks of the trade:
        http://groups.google.com/groups?oi=djq&as_ugroup=comp.lang.python&num=100
        http://groups.google.com/groups?meta=site%3Dgroups%26group%3Dcomp.lang.python.*

Previous - (U)se the (R)esource, (L)uke! - messages are listed here:
  http://www.ddj.com/topics/pythonurl/         
  http://purl.org/thecliff/python/url.html (dormant)
or
  http://groups.google.com/groups?oi=djq&as_q=+Python-URL!&as_ugroup=comp.lang.python


Suggestions/corrections for next week's posting are always welcome.
E-mail to <Python-URL@phaseit.net> should get through.

To receive a new issue of this posting in e-mail each Monday morning
(approximately), ask <claird@phaseit.net> to subscribe.  Mention
"Python-URL!".


-- The Python-URL! Team--

Dr. Dobb's Journal (http://www.ddj.com) is pleased to participate in and
sponsor the "Python-URL!" project.
From martin at v.loewis.de  Tue Jul 20 07:16:34 2004
From: martin at v.loewis.de (=?ISO-8859-1?Q?=22Martin_v=2E_L=F6wis=22?=)
Date: Tue Jul 20 13:47:13 2004
Subject: Call for Grant Proposals
Message-ID: <40fcaab1$0$27091$9b622d9e@news.freenet.de>

The Python Software Foundation is seeking grant proposals for projects 
related to the further development of Python, Python-related technology, 
and educational resources. The PSF plans to issue calls for proposals 
regularly.

Proposals should be for specific projects with a clear objective, rather 
than support for ongoing activities. Proposals should be brief (a few 
pages of text), and they should explain:

    a. what the objective of the project is,
    b. what precisely the funds are needed for,
    c. a delivery plan, indicating what deliverables will be provided at 
what time, and
    d. a payment plan, indicating what payments should be made at what 
time.

Awarded grants can range up to $40,000.

Proposals for this call must be submitted before October 1, 2004. 
Projects will start on November 1, 2004, and must be completed by 
October 30, 2005. Proposals should be sent to psf-grants@python.org.

Kind regards,
Martin v. L?wis
From stuart at stuartbishop.net  Tue Jul 20 12:14:14 2004
From: stuart at stuartbishop.net (Stuart Bishop)
Date: Tue Jul 20 13:47:14 2004
Subject: ANN: pytz-2004b World timezone library
Message-ID: <8D43523C-DA35-11D8-B7D4-000A95A06FC6@stuartbishop.net>

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
Hash: SHA1

I have made a new release of pytz using the new revision of the
Olsen time zone database made yesterday. The major change for this
release are the emergency Argentinean timezones currently in place.

pytz - World Timezone Definitions for Python
============================================

Introduction
~~~~~~~~~~~~

pytz brings the Olson tz database into Python. This library allows
accurate and cross platform timezone calculations using Python 2.3 or
higher.

This implementation solves the issue of ambiguous times at the end
of daylight savings, which you can read more about in the Python
Library Reference (datetime.tzinfo). The only remaining inaccuracy
is that datetime.strftime only reports the UTC offset to the nearest
minute (This is probably a feature - you have to draw a line somewhere).

536 of the Olsen timezones are supported. The missing few are for
Riyadh Solar Time in 1987, 1988 and 1989. As Saudi Arabia gave up
trying to cope with their timezone definition, I see no reason
to complicate my code further to cope with them. (I understand
the intention was to set sunset to 0:00 local time, the start of the
Islamic day. In the best case caused the DST offset to change daily
and worst case caused the DST offset to change each instant depending
on how you interpreted the ruling.)

Note that if you perform date arithmetic on local times that cross DST
boundaries, the results may be in an incorrect timezone (ie. subtract
1 minute from 2002-10-27 1:00 EST and you get 2002-10-27 0:59 EST 
instead
of the correct 2002-10-27 1:59 EDT). This cannot be resolved without
modifying the Python datetime implementation. However, these tzinfo
classes provide a normalize() method which allows you to correct these
values.


Installation
~~~~~~~~~~~~

This is a standard Python distutils distribution. To install the
package, run the following command as an administrative user::

     python setup.py install


Example & Usage
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

     >>> from datetime import datetime, timedelta
     >>> from pytz import timezone
     >>> utc = timezone('UTC')
     >>> eastern = timezone('US/Eastern')
     >>> utc_dt = datetime(2002, 10, 27, 6, 0, 0, tzinfo=utc)
     >>> loc_dt = utc_dt.astimezone(eastern)
     >>> fmt = '%Y-%m-%d %H:%M:%S %Z (%z)'
     >>> loc_dt.strftime(fmt)
     '2002-10-27 01:00:00 EST (-0500)'
     >>> (loc_dt - timedelta(minutes=10)).strftime(fmt)
     '2002-10-27 00:50:00 EST (-0500)'
     >>> eastern.normalize(loc_dt - timedelta(minutes=10)).strftime(fmt)
     '2002-10-27 01:50:00 EDT (-0400)'
     >>> (loc_dt + timedelta(minutes=10)).strftime(fmt)
     '2002-10-27 01:10:00 EST (-0500)'


License
~~~~~~~

BSD style license. I'm happy to relicense this code if necessary
for inclusion in other open source projects.


Latest Versions
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

This package will be updated after releases of the Olsen timezone 
database.
The latest version can be downloaded from sourceforge_. The code that
is used to generate this distribution is available in the sourceforge_
project's CVS repository.

.. _sourceforge: http://sourceforge.net/projects/pytz/


Further Reading
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

More info than you want to know about timezones::

     http://www.twinsun.com/tz/tz-link.htm


Contact
~~~~~~~

Stuart Bishop <stuart@stuartbishop.net>

- --  
Stuart Bishop <stuart@stuartbishop.net>
http://www.stuartbishop.net/
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-----
Version: GnuPG v1.2.3 (Darwin)

iD8DBQFA/PB2AfqZj7rGN0oRAtzXAKCKLyKkoLjPt/ITGIFMefrIAAIbdQCfWQk/
DEPWhLICWH0hNwd9SqZUg0w=
=U5U5
-----END PGP SIGNATURE-----

From faassen at infrae.com  Tue Jul 20 19:31:06 2004
From: faassen at infrae.com (Martijn Faassen)
Date: Thu Jul 22 15:48:42 2004
Subject: Silva 1.0 final released
Message-ID: <40fd56b2$0$36169$e4fe514c@news.xs4all.nl>

Silva 1.0: The Structured Content Management System
===================================================

July 20, 2004 - after two and a half years of development, the Silva
team is happy to announce the release of Silva 1.0. Silva is an open
source content management system with a focus on structured content
and its reuse. It is based on the open source web application platform
Zope, and the programming language Python.

New in Silva 1.0 are:

* Deeply integrated support for Kupu, the WYSIWYG through the web
   editor with support for both Mozilla and Internet Explorer.

* Silva 1.0 ships with full documentation that is a Silva publication
   itself. When you install a new Silva root you get the option to
   install the documentation as well.

* Other new features include image thumbnail support and image
   cropping support.

"At ETH we operate a mass virtual hosting Silva instance hosting a few
hundred sites," says Reinhard Hess, of the `central IT services`_ at
the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich (`ETH
Zurich`_). "In addition to that there are a number of sites being run
by independent departemental IT units across the university."  ETH
Zurich has been deploying Silva since 2002 - and they are also
developing on the platform. "Silva is well capable to compete
successfully with other web CMS products in the enterprise range -
either open source or closed source. Silva was a good choice for
us. Silva gives us the best cost/performance ratio even in the long
term and maximum operational flexibility."

The `University of Luton`_ in the UK is going online with a new
Silva-backed version of their site later this week. "Silva is a very
flexible tool for generating and maintaining web content," says Steve
Kendall, who is managing the project. "Previously all web content had
to be looked after by a small team of central staff with specialised
skills, but now we have the mechanisms in place to return full
ownership of the content to the faculties and departments."

.. _`ETH Zurich`: http://www.ethz.ch/
.. _`central IT services`: http://www.id.ethz.ch/
.. _`University of Luton`: http://www.luton.ac.uk/

Downloads
---------

You can download Silva 1.0 final here:

http://www.zope.org/Members/infrae/Silva

The -all.tgz ships with everything needed, including Kupu.

A list of changes can be found here:

http://www.zope.org/Members/infrae/Silva/HISTORY.txt

About Silva
-----------

Features of Silva include:

* Through-the-web user interface with easy access to all features,
   including access keys.

* Extensive documentation aimed to authors and editors, as well as for
   site managers, designers and system administrators.

* Through-the-web structured authoring of documents using a WYSIWIG
   editor (kupu) or a forms-based editor. Content can be published to
   the web and exported as XML. Content can be reused in multiple areas
   of a publication using ghost objects.

* Workflow and versioning support allows an author to work on a new
   version of a document while another version is already published
   online.

* Separation of responsibilities between author, editor, and chief
   editor roles. Optional full integration with very large user sources
   using LDAP. Extensive group management abilities (with or without
   LDAP).

* Resizing support for images, and extensive support to position
   images in document text. Images and files can be imported singly or
   in bulk.

* Flexible customizable presentation using Zope Page
   Templates. Different sub sites can have different publications and
   designs. Virtual hosting support for sub sites.

Silva extensions include:

* SilvaNews - create and manage news and agenda items in Silva. RSS
   syndication and aggregation support.

* DocMa - external server which integrates seamlessly into Silva and
   allows Silva publications to be exported to MS Word documents, and
   MS Word documents to be imported into Silva.

* SilvaExternalSources - include data from external sources into
   documents, including CSV files, results from relational database
   queries or any Python script.

More information about Silva can also be found here:

http://www.infrae.com/products/silva

More information about Infrae, the company that created Silva:

http://www.infrae.com

Press Contacts
--------------

Martijn Faassen, Infrae, faassen at infrae.com
From richardjones at optushome.com.au  Wed Jul 21 03:39:44 2004
From: richardjones at optushome.com.au (Richard Jones)
Date: Thu Jul 22 15:48:43 2004
Subject: SC-Track Roundup 0.7.6 - an issue tracking system
Message-ID: <200407211139.44765.richardjones@optushome.com.au>

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
Hash: SHA1

Roundup is a simple-to-use and -install issue-tracking system with
command-line, web and e-mail interfaces. It is based on the winning design
from Ka-Ping Yee in the Software Carpentry "Track" design competition.

Roundup now has a wiki which is accepting user contributions of example 
modifications, trackers, etc. at:

  http://www.mechanicalcat.net/tech/roundup/wiki/FrontPage

0.7.6 is a bug fix release, including:

- - rdbms backend full text search failure after import (sf bug 980314)
- - rdbms backends not filtering correctly on link=None
- - fix anydbm journal import (sf bug 983166)
- - handle postgresql bug in SQL generation (sf bug 984591)
- - fix dates-from-Dates (sf bug 984604)
- - fix messageid generated when msgid is None for send_message (sf bug 987933)
- - make user permissions check more sane (fix search page for anonymous)
- - fixed RDBMS filter() for no matches from full-text search (sf bug 990778)
- - fixed DateHTMLProperty for invalid date entry (sf bug 986538)
- - fixed external password source example (sf bug 986601)
- - document the STATIC_FILES config var
- - implement the HTTP HEAD command (sf bug 992544)
- - fix journal export of files to remove content from CSV files
- - API clarification. Previously, the anydbm/bsddb/metakit filter() methods
  had required exact matches to Multilink argument lists. The RDBMS
  backends treated Multilink matches like all other data types - matching
  any of the Multilink argument list is good enough. The latter behaviour
  is implemented across the board now.
- - fix metakit handling of filter on Link==None

If you're upgrading from an older version of Roundup you *must* follow
the "Software Upgrade" guidelines given in the maintenance documentation.

Roundup requires python 2.1.3 or later for correct operation.

To give Roundup a try, just download (see below), unpack and run::

    python demo.py

Source and documentation is available at the website:
     http://roundup.sourceforge.net/
Release Info (via download page):
     http://sourceforge.net/projects/roundup
Mailing lists - the place to ask questions:
     http://sourceforge.net/mail/?group_id=31577


About Roundup
=============

Roundup manages a number of issues (with flexible properties such as
"description", "priority", and so on) and provides the ability to:

(a) submit new issues,
(b) find and edit existing issues, and
(c) discuss issues with other participants.

The system will facilitate communication among the participants by managing
discussions and notifying interested parties when issues are edited. One of
the major design goals for Roundup that it be simple to get going. Roundup
is therefore usable "out of the box" with any python 2.1+ installation. It
doesn't even need to be "installed" to be operational, though a
disutils-based install script is provided.

It comes with two issue tracker templates (a classic bug/feature tracker and
a minimal skeleton) and seven database back-ends (anydbm, bsddb, bsddb3,
sqlite, metakit, mysql and postgresql).

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-----
Version: GnuPG v1.2.4 (GNU/Linux)

iD8DBQFA/clgrGisBEHG6TARArW+AJ9PZ/yo325TTtDrcgMfl2cTDI5nLgCfQCZr
K+W/lxj3h/o9uW3G6TEso+I=
=t5iA
-----END PGP SIGNATURE-----
From chris at psychofx.com  Sat Jul 24 22:14:33 2004
From: chris at psychofx.com (Chris Miles)
Date: Mon Jul 26 11:46:51 2004
Subject: EDDIE-Tool 0.33 Released
Message-ID: <13C1A92C-DDAE-11D8-9E3E-000A95DD3D44@psychofx.com>

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
Hash: SHA1

EDDIE-Tool 0.33 has just been released.
http://eddie-tool.net/

What is it ?
   The EDDIE-Tool is an intelligent UNIX monitoring agent
   written entirely in Python.  It provides system, network
   and security monitoring features, with an extensive
   configuration facility for defining customized monitoring
   and data collection rules.

What is new ?
   Support for two new platforms: OpenBSD and Darwin/OS X.
   Consider support for these platforms as beta - we still
   need plenty of testing, so volunteers would be great.
   Some other major updates are: Fine-grained HTTP timing;
   Configurable HTTP request timeouts (using Python 2.3+);
   Directive checktime parameter to specify exact times of
   day or days of week to perform tests; MySQL monitoring;
   and SNMP support for 64-bit counters.

Why is it interesting to Python users ?
   Besides system and network administrators, Python users may
   find EDDIE-Tool interesting as it is an example of a threaded,
   multi-platform software package, providing easy access to
   system statistics and using Python's power to offer a dynamic
   and programmable rules engine.

Regards,
Chris

- -- 
Chris Miles
http://chrismiles.info/
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-----
Version: GnuPG v1.2.4 (Darwin)

iD8DBQFBAsMxzitzBnMzNcIRAvb0AKCTvNqLzYLdRar30/MmZBHd6Op+2gCgigsC
ZgwgTv8EbM/6k4kHVFoax4M=
=ySlU
-----END PGP SIGNATURE-----

From gward at python.net  Sun Jul 25 01:32:35 2004
From: gward at python.net (Greg Ward)
Date: Mon Jul 26 11:46:51 2004
Subject: ANNOUNCE: Optik 1.5a1 released
Message-ID: <20040724233235.GA20060@cthulhu.gerg.ca>

Optik 1.5a1
===========

Optik is a powerful, flexible, extensible, easy-to-use command-line
parsing library for Python.  Using Optik, you can add intelligent,
sophisticated handling of command-line options to your scripts with very
little overhead.

Here's an example of using Optik to add some command-line options to a
simple script:

  from optik import OptionParser
  [...]
  parser = OptionParser()
  parser.add_option("-f", "--file", dest="filename",
                    help="write report to FILE", metavar="FILE")
  parser.add_option("-q", "--quiet",
                    action="store_false", dest="verbose", default=True,
                    help="don't print status messages to stdout")

  (options, args) = parser.parse_args()

With these few lines of code, users of your script can now do the
"usual thing" on the command-line:

  <yourscript> -f outfile --quiet
  <yourscript> -qfoutfile
  <yourscript> --file=outfile -q
  <yourscript> --quiet --file outfile

all of which result in the 'options' object looking like this:

  options.filename == "outfile"
  options.verbose == 0

Even niftier, users can run one of

  <yourscript> -h
  <yourscript> --help

and Optik will print out a brief summary of your script's options:

  usage: <yourscript> [options]

  options:
    -h, --help            show this help message and exit
    -f FILE, --file=FILE  write report to FILE
    -q, --quiet           don't print status messages to stdout

That's just a taste of the flexibility Optik gives you in parsing your
command-line.  See the documentation included in the package for
details.


AUTHOR, COPYRIGHT, AVAILABILITY
-------------------------------

Optik was written by Greg Ward <gward@python.net>

Optik 1.5a1 can be downloaded from:
  http://optik.sourceforge.net/Optik-1.5a1.tar.gz
  http://www.gerg.ca/software/optik/Optik-1.5a1.tar.gz

More information can be found at:
  http://optik.sourceforge.net/
  http://www.gerg.ca/software/optik/

Copyright (c) 2001-2004 Gregory P. Ward.  All rights reserved.


CHANGES IN OPTIK 1.5 (since 1.4.1)
----------------------------------

  * Optik now requires Python 2.2 or later.

  * Add expansion of default values in help text: the string
    "%default" in an option's help string is expanded to str() of
    that option's default value, or "none" if no default value.

  * SF bug #955889: option default values that happen to be strings are
    now processed in the same way as values from the command line; this
    allows generation of nicer help when using custom types.  Can
    be disabled with parser.set_process_default_values(False).

  * SF bug #960515: don't crash when generating help for callback
    options that specify 'type', but not 'dest' or 'metavar'.

  * SF feature #815264: change the default help format for short options
    that take an argument from e.g. "-oARG" to "-o ARG"; add
    set_short_opt_delimiter() and set_long_opt_delimiter() methods to
    HelpFormatter to allow (slight) customization of the formatting.

  * SF patch #736940: internationalize Optik: all built-in user-
    targeted literal strings are passed through gettext.gettext().  Also
    added po/ directory for message catalog and translations, so that
    Optik-based applications have a single place to go for translations
    of Optik's built-in messags.  Include translations for Danish and
    German (thanks to Frederik S. Olesen and Martin v. L?wis
    respectively), and partial translations for French (by me).

  * SF bug #878453 (Python): respect $COLUMNS environment variable for
    wrapping help output.

  * SF feature #964317: allow type objects to specify option types;
    allow "str" as an alias for "string".

  * SF feature #988122: expand "%prog" in the 'description' passed
    to OptionParser, just like in the 'usage' and 'version' strings.
    (This is *not* done in the 'description' passed to OptionGroup.)

  * Added HTML-formatted docs to the source distribution (in addition
    to the reStructuredText source files).

  * Added three new examples: custom_source.py, custom_type.py, and
    no_help.py.

-- 
Greg Ward <gward@python.net>                         http://www.gerg.ca/
I repeat myself when under stress I repeat myself when under stress I repeat---
From theller at python.net  Fri Jul 23 20:22:15 2004
From: theller at python.net (Thomas Heller)
Date: Mon Jul 26 11:48:20 2004
Subject: ctypes 0.9.0 released
Message-ID: <ekn260tk.fsf@python.net>


ctypes 0.9.0 released
=====================

Overview

    ctypes is a ffi (Foreign Function Interface) package for Python.

    It allows to call functions exposed from dlls/shared libraries and
    has extensive facilities to create, access and manipulate simpole
    and complicated C data types transparently from Python - in other
    words: wrap libraries in pure Python.

    ctypes runs on Windows, MacOS X, Linux, Solaris, FreeBSD.  It may
    also run on other systems, provided that libffi supports this
    platform.


Changes in 0.9.0

    ctypes now requires Python 2.3 or higher, Python 2.2 is no longer
    supported.

    The big change is that ctypes now uses the same code base on all
    platforms, many, many bug should have been fixed this way on
    non-windows systems.  The destribution now contains libffi, no need
    to find, download, build and install a compatible version.

    There have been lots of improvements and additions both to ctypes
    itself, and to the ctypes.com windows framework, too many to
    remember now and document here.

    Most prominent additions to ctypes.com are:

	A ctypes.com.client module supporting dynamic dispatch

	An internet explorer toolband sample

	Many improvements to the stoplite sample

    Detailed changelogs are in CVS (well, sometimes I forget to update
    them):
    
  <http://cvs.sourceforge.net/viewcvs.py/ctypes/ctypes/ChangeLog?rev=HEAD>

  <http://cvs.sourceforge.net/viewcvs.py/ctypes/ctypes/win32/com/ChangeLog?rev=HEAD>


Future plans

    The ultimate purpose of the 0.9 release series is to shake out the
    remaining bugs, especially on platforms I have no access to, and to
    target a rock stable ctypes 1.0 release.

    When ctypes 1.0 is released, the com framework will be split off
    into a separate framework named 'comtypes'.


Download

    Downloads are available in the sourceforge files section
    <http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=71702>

    Separate source distributions are available for windows and
    non-windows systems.  Please use the .zip file for Windows (it
    contains the ctypes.com framework), and use the .tar.gz file for
    non-Windows systems (it contains the complete cross-platform libffi
    sources).

    Binary windows installers, which contain compiled extension
    modules, are also available, be sure to download the correct one
    for the
    Python version you are using.


Homepage

    <http://starship.python.net/crew/theller/ctypes/>

Enjoy,

Thomas
From theller at python.net  Fri Jul 23 21:00:21 2004
From: theller at python.net (Thomas Heller)
Date: Mon Jul 26 11:48:21 2004
Subject: py2exe 0.5.3 released
Message-ID: <1xj25z22.fsf@python.net>


**py2exe 0.5.3** released
===================================

py2exe is a Python distutils extension which converts python scripts
into executable windows programs, able to run without requiring a
python installation.  Console and Windows (GUI) applications, windows
NT services, exe and dll COM servers are supported.

This release fixes a few bugs in the 0.5.2 version:

    * The windows installer has been fixed to avoid problems when
      doing non-admin installs.  Thanks to Harald A. Massa for testing.

    * Applied a patch from Mark Hammond to correctly manage the thread
      state in dll COM servers.

    * Add a line feed to the script's code, to avoid problems
      byte-compiling it when it contains trailing white space.

    * Fix a problem with Python 2.4 when no extension modules are
      needed - py2exe didn't track down that python24.dll is needed.


py2exe 0.5.2 is a bugfix release.
    
    * Print a message explaining what's going on whan a service
      exe is started from the command line.

    * py2exe did build invalid version resources, they didn't show up
      correctly on Win98 at least.  Patch by Roger Upole.

    * Fix a buffer overflow in the C code.  Patch by Ralf Sieger, closes
      bug item #893310

    * py2exe now (again) has a builtin list of dlls which should never be
      distributed

    * Patch sys.winver in the distributed pythonXY.dll, so that there is
      no possibility of conflicts with existing distributions and the
      registry keys found there.  Patch by Mark Hammond.

    * Fix several problems when an exception in a 'windows' exe occurs.

    * Include a workaround for unbounded recursion in modulefinder when
      Jason Jorendorff's path module is installed
      See also http://python.org/sf/876278

    * Fix problems when package_dir is set in the setup script,
      see http://tinyurl.com/yuc5l

    * py2exe can now be built from the sources with mingw32

    * py2exe does now handle precompile .pyo and .pyc files (patch by
      Shane Holloway)

    * Fix a problem when the exe's directory contains single quotes

    * Register service dependencies when installing a service

    * Return an exit code of 255 from the exe when there's an uncatched
      exception running the main script.

    * Print a warning instead of failing to build with weird version numbers.
      Suggested by Cory Dodt.

Homepage:

    <http://starship.python.net/crew/theller/py2exe>

Download from the usual location:

    <http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=15583>

Enjoy,

Thomas
From nas at mems-exchange.org  Fri Jul 23 23:08:11 2004
From: nas at mems-exchange.org (Neil Schemenauer)
Date: Mon Jul 26 11:48:21 2004
Subject: [ANNOUNCE] Durus object database
Message-ID: <20040723210811.GA10633@mems-exchange.org>

I am happy to announce the first public release of the Durus
object database.  Durus offers an easy way to maintain a consistent
persistent collection of Python object instances used by one or more
processes.  For more information, see the web site:

    http://www.mems-exchange.org/software/durus/

Although this release is numbered 0.1, we believe Durus is stable
and reliable.  We have been using it seriously for a some months now.
Please give it a try and let us know what you think.

Note that Durus does not support multi-threaded database access.  If
that is a requirement for your application, we recommend using the
Zope Object Database (ZODB) instead.
From webmaster at keyphrene.com  Sun Jul 25 14:26:38 2004
From: webmaster at keyphrene.com (webmaster@keyphrene.com)
Date: Mon Jul 26 11:48:22 2004
Subject: ANN: Naja 1.0.5 is now available
Message-ID: <4103a6ec$0$1892$636a15ce@news.free.fr>

Naja is a download manager and a website grabber written in Python/wxPython.You can add some 
plugins (newsreader, FTP client,WebDAV client) and take control of your downloads from your office.
Naja supports proxy(HTTP, HTTPS, FTP, SOCKS v4a, SOCKS v5), and use some authentication methods.
The downloading maybe achieved by splitting the file being downloaded into several parts and downloading
these parts at the same time (HTTP, HTTPS, FTP). Donwload speeds are increased by downloading the file 
from the mirrors sites, when the sites propose it.

Others features:
 Csv filter
 Cheksums (CRC32, MD2, MD4, MD5, SHA, SHA1, MDC2, RMD160)
 Crypt (Only for the eXtended version) and Decrypt (AES, DES, 3DES ...)
 newsreader, newsposter (uue, yEnc)
 CGI & WebDAV Server
 Web Interface
 basic and digest authentication for client and server
 Compress and decompress (zip, tar.gz, tar.bz2)
 Picture viewer

Naja is available for download from the Keyphrene web site:
http://www.keyphrene.com/products/naja
From stuart at stuartbishop.net  Sun Jul 25 22:42:24 2004
From: stuart at stuartbishop.net (Stuart Bishop)
Date: Mon Jul 26 11:48:23 2004
Subject: ANN: pytz 2004b.2 - Python world timezone library
Message-ID: <22796F11-DE7B-11D8-9869-000A95A06FC6@stuartbishop.net>

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
Hash: SHA1

Changes for this release:
	- Improved localtime handling, and added a localize() method enabling
	  correct creation of local times.


pytz - World Timezone Definitions for Python
============================================

:Author: Stuart Bishop <stuart@stuartbishop.net>
:Version: $Revision: 1.10 $

Introduction
~~~~~~~~~~~~

pytz brings the Olson tz database into Python. This library allows
accurate and cross platform timezone calculations using Python 2.3
or higher. It also solves the issue of ambiguous times at the end
of daylight savings, which you can read more about in the Python
Library Reference (datetime.tzinfo).

546 of the Olsen timezones are supported [*]_.

Note that if you perform date arithmetic on local times that cross
DST boundaries, the results may be in an incorrect timezone (ie.
subtract 1 minute from 2002-10-27 1:00 EST and you get 2002-10-27
0:59 EST instead of the correct 2002-10-27 1:59 EDT). This cannot
be resolved without modifying the Python datetime implementation.
However, these tzinfo classes provide a normalize() method which
allows you to correct these values.


Installation
~~~~~~~~~~~~

This is a standard Python distutils distribution. To install the
package, run the following command as an administrative user::

     python setup.py install


Example & Usage
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

 >>> from datetime import datetime, timedelta
 >>> from pytz import timezone
 >>> utc = timezone('UTC')
 >>> eastern = timezone('US/Eastern')
 >>> fmt = '%Y-%m-%d %H:%M:%S %Z%z'

The preferred way of dealing with times is to always work in UTC,
converting to localtime only when generating output to be read
by humans.

 >>> utc_dt = datetime(2002, 10, 27, 6, 0, 0, tzinfo=utc)
 >>> loc_dt = utc_dt.astimezone(eastern)
 >>> loc_dt.strftime(fmt)
'2002-10-27 01:00:00 EST-0500'

This library also allows you to do date arithmetic using local
times, although it is more complicated than working in UTC as you
need to use the `normalize` method to handle daylight savings time
and other timezone transitions. In this example, `loc_dt` is set
to the instant when daylight savings time ends in the US/Eastern
timezone.

 >>> before = loc_dt - timedelta(minutes=10)
 >>> before.strftime(fmt)
'2002-10-27 00:50:00 EST-0500'
 >>> eastern.normalize(before).strftime(fmt)
'2002-10-27 01:50:00 EDT-0400'
 >>> after = eastern.normalize(before + timedelta(minutes=20))
 >>> after.strftime(fmt)
'2002-10-27 01:10:00 EST-0500'

Creating localtimes is also tricky, and the reason why working with
local times is not recommended. Unfortunately, you cannot just pass
a 'tzinfo' argument when constructing a datetime (see the next section
for more details)

 >>> dt = datetime(2002, 10, 27, 1, 30, 0)
 >>> dt1 = eastern.localize(dt, is_dst=True)
 >>> dt1.strftime(fmt)
'2002-10-27 01:30:00 EDT-0400'
 >>> dt2 = eastern.localize(dt, is_dst=False)
 >>> dt2.strftime(fmt)
'2002-10-27 01:30:00 EST-0500'


Problems with Localtime
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

The major problem we have to deal with is that certain datetimes
may occur twice in a year. For example, in the US/Eastern timezone
on the last Sunday morning in October, the following sequence
happens:

     - 01:00 EDT occurs
     - 1 hour later, instead of 2:00am the clock is turned back 1 hour
       and 01:00 happens again (this time 01:00 EST)

In fact, every instant between 01:00 and 02:00 occurs twice. This means
that if you try and create a time in the US/Eastern timezone using
the standard datetime syntax, there is no way to specify if you meant
before of after the end-of-daylight-savings-time transition.

 >>> loc_dt = datetime(2002, 10, 27, 1, 30, 00, tzinfo=eastern)
 >>> loc_dt.strftime(fmt)
'2002-10-27 01:30:00 EST-0500'

As you can see, the system has chosen one for you and there is a 50%
chance of it being out by one hour. For some applications, this does
not matter. However, if you are trying to schedule meetings with people
in different timezones or analyze log files it is not acceptable. The
best and simplest solution is to stick with using UTC. If you insist
on working with local times, this library provides a facility for
constructing them almost unambiguously

 >>> loc_dt = datetime(2002, 10, 27, 1, 30, 00)
 >>> est_dt = eastern.localize(loc_dt, is_dst=True)
 >>> edt_dt = eastern.localize(loc_dt, is_dst=False)
 >>> print est_dt.strftime(fmt), '/', edt_dt.strftime(fmt)
2002-10-27 01:30:00 EDT-0400 / 2002-10-27 01:30:00 EST-0500

Note that although this handles many cases, it is still not possible
to handle all. In cases where countries change their timezone 
definitions,
cases like the end-of-daylight-savings-time occur with no way of 
resolving
the ambiguity. For example, in 1915 Warsaw switched from Warsaw time to
Central European time. So at the stroke of midnight on August 4th 1915
the clocks were wound back 24 minutes creating a ambiguous time period
that cannot be specified without referring to the timezone abbreviation
or the actual UTC offset.


What is UTC
~~~~~~~~~~~

`UTC` is Universal Time, formerly known as Greenwich Mean Time or GMT.
All other timezones are given as offsets from UTC. No daylight savings
time occurs in UTC, making it a useful timezone to perform date 
arithmetic
without worrying about the confusion and ambiguities caused by daylight
savings time transitions, your country changing its timezone, or mobile
computers that move roam through multiple timezones.


License
~~~~~~~

BSD style license. I'm happy to relicense this code if necessary
for inclusion in other open source projects.


Latest Versions
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

This package will be updated after releases of the Olsen timezone 
database.
The latest version can be downloaded from Sourceforge_. The code that
is used to generate this distribution is available in the Sourceforge_
project's CVS repository.

.. _Sourceforge: http://sourceforge.net/projects/pytz/


Issues & Limitations
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

- - Offsets from UTC are rounded to the nearest whole minute, so timezones
   such as Europe/Amsterdam pre 1937 will be up to 30 seconds out. This 
is
   a limitation of the Python datetime library.


Further Reading
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

More info than you want to know about timezones::

     http://www.twinsun.com/tz/tz-link.htm


Contact
~~~~~~~

Stuart Bishop <stuart@stuartbishop.net>

.. [*]  The missing few are for Riyadh Solar Time in 1987, 1988 and 
1989.
         As Saudi Arabia gave up trying to cope with their timezone
         definition, I see no reason to complicate my code further
         to cope with them.  (I understand the intention was to set
         sunset to 0:00 local time, the start of the Islamic day.
         In the best case caused the DST offset to change daily and
         worst case caused the DST offset to change each instant
         depending on how you interpreted the ruling.)


- --  
Stuart Bishop <stuart@stuartbishop.net>
http://www.stuartbishop.net/
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-----
Version: GnuPG v1.2.3 (Darwin)

iD8DBQFBBBsxAfqZj7rGN0oRAsb5AJsHk/7ZIQFXbFFXedttcs/H5wEGiACdE5DY
iY3X1ddjuEAbeWc6OlEQGYo=
=gMyS
-----END PGP SIGNATURE-----

From python-url at phaseit.net  Mon Jul 26 14:01:35 2004
From: python-url at phaseit.net (Peter Otten)
Date: Wed Jul 28 20:02:47 2004
Subject: Dr. Dobb's Python-URL! - weekly Python news and links (Jul 26)
Message-ID: <E1Bp4Ah-0002OQ-TG@lairds.us>

QOTW:  "With only one historian, there are no errors, everything written
becomes fact." - Raymond Hettinger about Brett Cannon as the author of the
python-dev summary

"[C]ode runs in the scope it was *defined* in, not the scope it is invoked
in." - Jp Calderone


    Dan Bishop posts a string-to-date conversion oneliner for Martin Bless.
        http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=ad052e5c.0407201114.71ba95a0%40posting.google.com
    
    When Chris asked for a translation of his QBasic drawing code into
    Python, I was about to answer "you need a little more boilerplate".
    But then I learned about turtle module.
        http://groups.google.com/groups?threadm=Xns952E8286F18Fduncanrcpcouk%40127.0.0.1
    
    Marduk wants string formatting to work with arbitrary sequences
    instead of tuples. It should not be required that all items in the
    sequence are consumed by the format string. Hans Nowak proposes a nice
    try-and-error approach.
        http://groups.google.com/groups?threadm=40FF1A61.9050408%40zephyrfalcon.org
    
    [Off topic] Watch gumshoes Quinlan, Rowe, and Andreas uncover the evil
    *** (I won't spoil it) haunting newbie Fred's Python experience.
        http://groups.google.com/groups?threadm=urqsf0lvs9eq64b4ruv5rpsa57ddl35gb8%404ax.com&rnum=1
    
    Dave Reed has written an article about "Rapid Application Development
    with Python and Glade".
        http://www.linuxjournal.com/article.php?sid=7421
    
    Istvan Albert describes how to use standard Python classes with Zope.
        http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=dY6dnXGNQOQMvJzcRVn-og%40giganews.com
    
    Steve wants to extract numbers embedded in a text following a certain
    pattern. A job for regular expressions? If you follow c.l.py, you will
    probably have noted that everything that can be done with regexps can
    also be achieved with Paul McGuire's pyparsing. Time to give it a try.
        http://groups.google.com/groups?threadm=e3805b94.0407240932.6d43a16b%40posting.google.com
        http://pyparsing.sourceforge.net
    
    "It really shouldn't be considered 'amazing' that people donate, I
    think... it just makes sense.", as Peter Hansen puts it. Thanks to a
    large number of donors, the Python Software Foundation is able to
    support Python-related projects.
        http://groups.google.com/groups?threadm=40fcaa90%240%2427091%249b622d9e%40news.freenet.de
        http://www.python.org/psf/call-2004.html
        http://www.python.org/psf/donations.html
    
    
========================================================================
Everything Python-related you want is probably one or two clicks away in
these pages:

    Python.org's Python Language Website is the traditional
    center of Pythonia
        http://www.python.org
    Notice especially the master FAQ
        http://www.python.org/doc/FAQ.html

    PythonWare complements the digest you're reading with the
    marvelous daily python url
         http://www.pythonware.com/daily  
    Mygale is a news-gathering webcrawler that specializes in (new)
    World-Wide Web articles related to Python.
         http://www.awaretek.com/nowak/mygale.html 
    While cosmetically similar, Mygale and the Daily Python-URL
    are utterly different in their technologies and generally in
    their results.

    comp.lang.python.announce announces new Python software.  Be
    sure to scan this newsgroup weekly.
        http://groups.google.com/groups?oi=djq&as_ugroup=comp.lang.python.announce

    Brett Cannon continues the marvelous tradition established by 
    Andrew Kuchling and Michael Hudson of intelligently summarizing
    action on the python-dev mailing list once every other week.
	http://www.python.org/dev/summary/

    The Python Package Index catalogues packages.
        http://www.python.org/pypi/

    The somewhat older Vaults of Parnassus ambitiously collects references
    to all sorts of Python resources.
        http://www.vex.net/~x/parnassus/   

    Much of Python's real work takes place on Special-Interest Group
    mailing lists
        http://www.python.org/sigs/

    The Python Business Forum "further[s] the interests of companies
    that base their business on ... Python."
	http://www.python-in-business.org

    The Python Software Foundation (PSF) has replaced the Python
    Consortium as an independent nexus of activity.  It has official
    responsibility for Python's development and maintenance. 
        http://www.python.org/psf/
    Among the ways you can support PSF is with a donation.
        http://www.python.org/psf/donate.html

    Cetus collects Python hyperlinks.
        http://www.cetus-links.org/oo_python.html

    Python FAQTS
        http://python.faqts.com/

    The Cookbook is a collaborative effort to capture useful and
    interesting recipes.
	http://aspn.activestate.com/ASPN/Cookbook/Python

    Among several Python-oriented RSS/RDF feeds available are
	http://www.python.org/channews.rdf
	http://bootleg-rss.g-blog.net/pythonware_com_daily.pcgi
	http://python.de/backend.php
    For more, see
	http://www.syndic8.com/feedlist.php?ShowMatch=python&ShowStatus=all
    The old Python "To-Do List" now lives principally in a
    SourceForge reincarnation.
        http://sourceforge.net/tracker/?atid=355470&group_id=5470&func=browse
        http://python.sourceforge.net/peps/pep-0042.html
     
    The online Python Journal is posted at pythonjournal.cognizor.com.
    editor@pythonjournal.com and editor@pythonjournal.cognizor.com
    welcome submission of material that helps people's understanding
    of Python use, and offer Web presentation of your work.

    *Py: the Journal of the Python Language*
        http://www.pyzine.com

    Archive probing tricks of the trade:
        http://groups.google.com/groups?oi=djq&as_ugroup=comp.lang.python&num=100
        http://groups.google.com/groups?meta=site%3Dgroups%26group%3Dcomp.lang.python.*

Previous - (U)se the (R)esource, (L)uke! - messages are listed here:
  http://www.ddj.com/topics/pythonurl/         
  http://purl.org/thecliff/python/url.html (dormant)
or
  http://groups.google.com/groups?oi=djq&as_q=+Python-URL!&as_ugroup=comp.lang.python


Suggestions/corrections for next week's posting are always welcome.
E-mail to <Python-URL@phaseit.net> should get through.

To receive a new issue of this posting in e-mail each Monday morning
(approximately), ask <claird@phaseit.net> to subscribe.  Mention
"Python-URL!".


-- The Python-URL! Team--

Dr. Dobb's Journal (http://www.ddj.com) is pleased to participate in and
sponsor the "Python-URL!" project.


From max at alcyone.com  Mon Jul 26 22:01:02 2004
From: max at alcyone.com (Erik Max Francis)
Date: Wed Jul 28 20:02:48 2004
Subject: ANN: googlism.py 1.0 -- Python access to googlism.com
Message-ID: <410562FE.30E15617@alcyone.com>

Summary

    Command line and Python module access to googlism.com.


Overview

    The googlism.py module provides both Python module and command
    line access to googlism.com, the Web site which sifts through the
    results of the popular search engine Google and reports
    information about individual keywords.


Getting the software

    The current version of googlism is 1.0.

    The latest version of the software is available in a tarball here:
    http://www.alcyone.com/software/googlism/googlism-latest.tar.gz.

    The official URL for this Web site is
    http://www.alcyone.com/software/googlism/.


Requirements

    googlism.py is intended to be used with Python 2.2 or later.


License

    This code is released under the GPL.

-- 
 __ Erik Max Francis && max@alcyone.com && http://www.alcyone.com/max/
/  \ San Jose, CA, USA && 37 20 N 121 53 W && AIM erikmaxfrancis
\__/ I grow with each breath that I take / I cherish my freedom
    -- Chante Moore
From premshree_python at yahoo.co.in  Tue Jul 27 17:18:58 2004
From: premshree_python at yahoo.co.in (=?iso-8859-1?q?Premshree=20Pillai?=)
Date: Wed Jul 28 20:03:33 2004
Subject: SMS to LJ Gateway in Python
Message-ID: <20040727151858.44341.qmail@web8308.mail.in.yahoo.com>

Hello,

I wrote an SMS to LiveJournal gateway using which you
can post to your LiveJournal by sending an SMS.

The source is available at
http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=107524&package_id=125003

There are certain issues ... and I am working on it.

-Premshree Pillai
http://www.livejournal.com/~premshree/

=====
-Premshree
[http://www.qiksearch.com/]

________________________________________________________________________
Yahoo! India Matrimony: Find your life partner online
Go to: http://yahoo.shaadi.com/india-matrimony
From uche.ogbuji at fourthought.com  Wed Jul 28 14:59:01 2004
From: uche.ogbuji at fourthought.com (Uche Ogbuji)
Date: Wed Jul 28 20:03:34 2004
Subject: ANN: Scimitar 0.5.0
Message-ID: <1091019541.19713.104.camel@borgia>


http://uche.ogbuji.net/tech/4Suite/scimitar

Scimitar is an implementation of ISO Schematron that compiles a
Schematron schema into a Python validator script, making it a
faster and somewhat more flexible approach than the usual XSLT
implementations.

http://www.ascc.net/xml/resource/schematron/schematron.html

Schematron is an XML schema language in which you express a set of rules
that the document must meet, rather than expressing a full grammar for
the XML vocabulary (which is the more common approach to XML schemata).
It is by far the most flexible XML schema language available.

Scimitar support all of the Schematron 1.5 subset except for keys.
See the TODO file for gaps in Scimitar functionality and convenience,
which are being worked on.

Scimitar is open source, provided under the 4Suite variant of the Apache
license.

The compiler program runs standalone on Python 2.2 or more recent,
although if you are using an earlier version than 2,3, you must also
install Optik 1.4.1 or more recent.  In addition to the above
requirements the generated validators require 4Suite 1.0a3 or more
recent (really only tested with latest 4Suite CVS).


-- 
Uche Ogbuji                                    Fourthought, Inc.
http://uche.ogbuji.net    http://4Suite.org    http://fourthought.com
Perspective on XML: Steady steps spell success with Google - http://www.adtmag.com/article.asp?id=9663
Use XML namespaces with care - http://www-106.ibm.com/developerworks/xml/library/x-namcar.html
Managing XML libraries - http://www.adtmag.com/article.asp?id=9160
Commentary on "Objects. Encapsulation. XML?" - http://www.adtmag.com/article.asp?id=9090
Harold's Effective XML - http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/xml/library/x-think25.html
A survey of XML standards - http://www-106.ibm.com/developerworks/xml/library/x-stand4/

From brian at sweetapp.com  Wed Jul 28 18:54:00 2004
From: brian at sweetapp.com (Brian Quinlan)
Date: Wed Jul 28 20:03:35 2004
Subject: ANN: Vancouver Python Workshop - Open keynote address and reception
In-Reply-To: <40EC13B8.4010509@sweetapp.com>
References: <40CF1521.5040901@sweetapp.com> <40D5D59A.4060004@sweetapp.com>
	<40D86489.5060604@sweetapp.com> <40DC539D.2060206@sweetapp.com>
	<40E024D5.9090906@sweetapp.com> <40E2E20D.2080001@sweetapp.com>
	<40EC13B8.4010509@sweetapp.com>
Message-ID: <4107DA28.10309@sweetapp.com>

The Vancouver Python Conference is pleased to announce that the
conference's keynote addresses will be open to the public. Guido van
Rossum (Python's creator), Jon Udell (prolific author and analyst) and
Bram Cohen (creator of BitTorrent) will be speaking. Admission will be
done on a first-come basis and is free of change.

After the keynote, there will be a reception that is also open to the
public. Admission is CDN$20/person and will be done on a first-come
basis. Exact cash payment can be made before the keynote or directly at
the reception. The reception will only include snacks so participants
are strongly advised to eat ahead of time.

If you have any questions, please contact:
brian@sweetapp.com

Vancouver Python Conference website:
http://www.vanpyz.org/conference/

When
====

Keynote: July 31st 5:00pm to 6:30pm
          Registration begins at 4:00pm

Reception: July 31st 8:00pm to 11:00pm
            Registration begins at 8:00pm

Where
=====

Keynote addresses:

Simon Fraser University Harbour Center
Main Concourse, Room 1900
555 West Hastings Street
Vancouver
http://www.harbour.sfu.ca/

Reception:

Streamworks
375 Water Street,
Vancouver
http://www.steamworks.com/

Who
===

Guido van Rossum is the inventor of Python, an increasingly popular
language for the creation of open source and commercial programs. Guido
has managed the growth and development of Python for more than a decade
and in 2002 was given the Free Software Foundation Award. In 1999 he was
given Dr.Dobb's 1999 Excellence in Programming Award.

Jon Udell is an author, information architect, software developer and
groupware evangelist. He has been an independent consultant, was BYTE
Magazine's editor-at-large, executive editor and Web maven, and long ago
developed business information products for Lotus. In June 2002 he
joined InfoWorld as lead analyst. He also writes a monthly column for
the O'Reilly Network.

Bram Cohen is the creator of BitTorrent, a revolutionary technology for
distributing files over the Internet. BitTorrent has millions of users
and is used to transfer millions of gigabytes of data each month. He is
the organizer of CodeCon, a technical conference for peer to peer
technologies. He is also a respected writer, juggler and creator of
original origami.

Cheers,
Brian

From bac at OCF.Berkeley.EDU  Thu Jul 29 02:17:30 2004
From: bac at OCF.Berkeley.EDU (Brett Cannon)
Date: Thu Jul 29 03:22:50 2004
Subject: python-dev Summary for 2004-07-01 through 2004-07-15
Message-ID: <4108421A.2000604@ocf.berkeley.edu>

python-dev Summary for 2004-07-01 through 2004-07-15
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
This is a summary of traffic on the `python-dev mailing list`_ from July 
01, 2004 through July 15, 2004.  It is intended to inform the wider 
Python community of on-going developments on the list.  To comment on 
anything mentioned here, just post to `comp.lang.python`_ (or email 
python-list@python.org which is a gateway to the newsgroup) with a 
subject line mentioning what you are discussing. All python-dev members 
are interested in seeing ideas discussed by the community, so don't 
hesitate to take a stance on something.  And if all of this really 
interests you then get involved and join `python-dev`_!

This is the forty-forth summary written by Brett Cannon (wished he could 
be at
OSCON to see Guido throw a pie).

To contact me, please send email to brett at python.org ; I do not have 
the time to keep up on comp.lang.python and thus do not always catch 
follow-ups posted there.

All summaries are archived at http://www.python.org/dev/summary/ .

Please note that this summary is written using reStructuredText_ which 
can be found at http://docutils.sf.net/rst.html .  Any unfamiliar 
punctuation is probably markup for reST_ (otherwise it is probably 
regular expression syntax or a typo =); you can safely ignore it, 
although I suggest learning reST; it's simple and is accepted for `PEP 
markup`_ and gives some perks for the HTML output.  Also, because of the 
wonders of programs that like to reformat text, I cannot guarantee you 
will be able to run the text version of this summary through Docutils_ 
as-is unless it is from the `original text file`_.

.. _PEP Markup: http://www.python.org/peps/pep-0012.html

The in-development version of the documentation for Python can be found at
http://www.python.org/dev/doc/devel/ and should be used when looking up any
documentation on new code; otherwise use the current documentation as 
found at
http://docs.python.org/ .  PEPs (Python Enhancement Proposals) are 
located at http://www.python.org/peps/ .  To view files in the Python 
CVS online, go to http://cvs.sourceforge.net/cgi-bin/viewcvs.cgi/python/ 
.  Reported bugs and suggested patches can be found at the SourceForge_ 
project page.

The `Python Software Foundation`_ is the non-profit organization that 
holds the intellectual property for Python.  It also tries to forward 
the development and use of Python.  But the PSF_ cannot do this without 
donations.  You can make a donation at 
http://python.org/psf/donations.html .  Every penny helps so even a 
small donation (you can donate through PayPal or by check) helps.

.. _python-dev: http://www.python.org/dev/
.. _SourceForge: http://sourceforge.net/tracker/?group_id=5470
.. _python-dev mailing list: 
http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-dev
.. _comp.lang.python: http://groups.google.com/groups?q=comp.lang.python
.. _Docutils: http://docutils.sf.net/
.. _reST:
.. _reStructuredText: http://docutils.sf.net/rst.html
.. _PSF:
.. _Python Software Foundation: http://python.org/psf/

.. contents::

.. _last summary: 
http://www.python.org/dev/summary/2004-07-01_2004-07-15.html
.. _original text file: 
http://www.python.org/dev/summary/2004-07-01_2004-07-15.ht



Summary Announcements
=====================
I don't think my informal editors on python-dev often enough for their 
help.  In case you didn't know, I send a rough draft (read: first draft 
since I **hate** proof-reading) to python-dev before a summary out for 
general consumption to make sure I didn't totally get something wrong. 
Luckily I tend not to screw stuff up that badly and it ends up being 
little grammatical errors here and there.  But if it wasn't for them the 
summaries would not be the level of quality that they are (read: 
wouldn't seem like they are written by some grad student with impeccable 
grammar but instead as if they are written by some grad student with 
decent grammar =).  Anyway, I just felt like I should give a public 
thanks to everyone who has ever sent me a fix.

In case you didn't know, Python 2.4a1 was released in early July.  If 
you have not already please `download <http://www.python.org/2.4/>`__ it 
and run the `regression test suite 
<http://www.python.org/dev/doc/devel/lib/regrtest.html>`__.

And it looks like Unicode will finally work in the Summaries!  Thanks 
for that goes to David Goodger for making that happen.

Summaries
=========
------------------
2.4a1 out the door
------------------
Thanks to Anthony Baxter, `Python 2.4a1`_ went out the door in early 
July.  If you have not downloaded it and run the regression test suite, 
please do (see the stdlib docs on the 'test' pacakge on how to run the 
tests and please check if you can that any failures you got were not 
already posted and possibly fixed in CVS).

.. _Python 2.4a1: http://www.python.org/2.4/

Contributing threads:
   - `2.4a1 
<http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2004-July/045944.html>`__
   - `RELEASED Python 2.4, alpha 1 
<http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2004-July/046013.html>`__

--------------------------------
MSI installer on Windows for 2.4
--------------------------------
Some discussion on Martin v. L?wis' MSI installer code took place on the 
list.  It seemed like Martin's installer was good and just needed some docs.

Contributing threads:
   - `VC 7.1 maintenance? 
<http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2004-July/045815.html>`__
   - `Windows installer for 2.4? 
<http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2004-July/045954.html>`__

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Decimal is in the stdlib with defaults for people who don't have a "bot" 
nickname
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Since the Decimal package went in at the beginning of July, most of the 
discussions about Decimal revolved around making it easy to use out of 
the box for normal folk; "practicality beats purity".

First discussion was over invalid constructor arguments.  Originally if 
you tried something like ``Decimal("Raymond")``, it would return NaN. 
Obviously that ain't cool.  Turned out to be a misinterpretation of the 
IBM spec that Decimal is based on.  In the doc an exception being 
"signaled" is the same as it being raised in Python.  So that got 
clarified and now raises an exception.

 From there a discussion of what signals should be on by default ensued. 
  Michael Chermside sparked it with his list of what he thought would 
work.  Some other people posted theirs and all of them coagulated into a 
final list.  Those defaults have been added to CVS and will be available 
in 2.4a2 .

Contributing threads:
   - `decimal API 
<http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2004-July/045859.html>`__
   - `decimal.py signals & traps 
<http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2004-July/045963.html>`__

---------------------------------------------------------
The second Python Bug Day stomped out some of the buggers
---------------------------------------------------------
AM Kuchling organized another Python Bug Day on July 10.  A couple of 
people, including yours truly, showed up on #python-dev and managed to 
close a bunch of patches and bugs; 18 and 15 of them to be exact. 
Thanks to all that helped out, it was fun.

The next one is tentatively scheduled for August 7th.

Contributing threads:
   - `Python Bug day this Saturday 
<http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2004-July/045901.html>`__
   - `Bug day outcome 
<http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2004-July/046065.html>`__

----------------------------------
file()?  open()?  Paper?  Plastic?
----------------------------------
Guido had noticed someone had committed a patch that changed open() to 
file().  While some of us thought that using the file type's factory 
constructor was the proper way to open files, Guido set us straight. 
Turns out he wants open() to be used for opening files.  Part of the 
reason is that open() might at some point develop the abilities to open 
other things such as URLs (think ``open`` on OS X).

Contributing threads:
   - `file() or open()? 
<http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2004-July/045921.html>`__

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
What happens when you try to enter a new key in a dict that has another 
key considered equal?
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Michael Chermside wondered the same thing.  Tim Peters answered.  Turns 
out to be undefined, but currently implemented as to keep the original 
key and not the new key.

Contributing threads:
   - `Equal but different keys in dicts 
<http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2004-July/046040.html>`__

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
New macro that decrefs and sets to NULL a value, all while spinning 
plates on sticks!
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Jim Fulton added a new macro named Py_CLEAR() that takes in a variable, 
Py_DECREFs it, and then sets it to NULL.  The common use case is a field 
in a struct that can hold a PyObject but not always which is set to NULL 
when it doesn't.  It is in no way meant to signify the PyObject should 
be garbage collected immediately, just that the current variable no 
longer holds a reference to anything.

Contributing threads:
   - `Proposal: C API Macro to decref and set to NULL 
<http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2004-July/046086.html>`__

--------------------------------------
Trying out tagged integers in the core
--------------------------------------
Result: can be faster, but people don't want the added complexity (and 
Guido had a bad experience while developing the ABC language).

For those of you who don't know what tagged integers are, imagine all 
PyObjects being either an object or integer based on whether certain 
bits were flipped.  This has the perk of saving space and not having to 
do a memory fetch to get to the int value in an int object.  Problem is 
you now have to check constantly whether a PyObject is really a pointer 
or a tagged integer.

Contributing threads:
   - `Tagged integers 
<http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2004-July/046139.html>`__

------------------------------------------------------
You are not getting proper tail recursion optimization
------------------------------------------------------
If you know what proper tail recursion is, skip this paragraph.  Still 
there? OK, on with the lesson.  Proper tail recursion is when a 
recursive call is made in which the callee does not need to return to 
the caller.  Think of a 'return' statement that makes a recursive 
function call only; you don't *have* to return through the call chain 
since you just want that return statement to get to the first point 
where you are going to perform calculations on it.  So if you have a 
recursive 'return' statement you can skip creating a bunch of frames 
that stick around by just having each subsequent tail recursive call 
just return to the beginning of the recursion.  Confused yet?  Use 
Scheme and you will know what I am talking about (this stuff is actually 
*required* by the Scheme specification).  I could explain it using 
continuations, but chances are more people know about tail recursion 
than continuations so I am not even go to bother melting your brains 
with continuations.  =)

A patch to add proper tail recursion optimization was proposed, but 
Guido shot it down very strongly.  Guido has spoken and is not about to 
change his mind.  If you want to read the **long** thread on why then go 
ahead.  Basically, though, Guido said that if you are writing recursive 
code that is hitting the recursion limit you should probably change your 
algorithm.  There was also issues with how to handle tracebacks but that 
wasn't as entertaining.  =)

Contributing threads:
   - `Proper tail recursion 
<http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2004-July/046150.html>`__
From karl.lindekugel at gmail.com  Wed Jul 28 20:18:51 2004
From: karl.lindekugel at gmail.com (Karl Lindekugel)
Date: Thu Jul 29 03:23:10 2004
Subject: Ann: PyGT 0.01 and PyMenu 0.01
Message-ID: <2815dea10407281118467f9a88@mail.gmail.com>

Initial (Alpha) releases of two new modules:

PyGT - Python Grid Toolkit
A framework for developing, deploying, and managing grid systems using
python modules. Curently very alpha, releasing to gauge public
interest in project. GPL

PyMenu - Python Menu Toolkit
An easy-to-use API for making quick curses menus in python. Alpha, LGPL

Both of these projects can be found at 
http://www.karllindekugel.com/
From brojohan at hotmail.com  Wed Jul 28 22:01:01 2004
From: brojohan at hotmail.com (Bror Johansson)
Date: Thu Jul 29 03:23:11 2004
Subject: IronPython 0.6
Message-ID: <2mqevtFq512bU1@uni-berlin.de>

Available on http://ironpython.com/
/BJ


From michael at stroeder.com  Thu Jul 29 01:49:51 2004
From: michael at stroeder.com (=?ISO-8859-1?Q?Michael_Str=F6der?=)
Date: Thu Jul 29 03:23:12 2004
Subject: ANN: python-ldap-2.0.1
Message-ID: <41083B9F.5060205@stroeder.com>

Find a new pre-release of python-ldap:

   http://python-ldap.sourceforge.net/

python-ldap provides an object-oriented API to access LDAP directory
servers from Python programs. It mainly wraps the OpenLDAP 2.x libs for
that purpose. Additionally it contains modules for other LDAP-related
stuff (e.g. processing LDIF, LDAPURLs and LDAPv3 schema).

----------------------------------------------------------------
Released 2.0.2 2004-07-29

Changes since 2.0.1:

Modules:
* Fixed detecting appropriate OpenLDAP libs version for
   determining whether ldap_whoami_s() is available or not.
   This fixes build problems with OpenLDAP libs 2.1.0 up
   to 2.1.12.
From brett at python.org  Thu Jul 29 20:05:57 2004
From: brett at python.org (Brett C.)
Date: Mon Aug  2 02:34:58 2004
Subject: python-dev Summary for 2004-07-01 through 2004-07-15
References: <mailman.903.1091064170.5135.python-announce-list@python.org>
Message-ID: <8ab0589d.0407291005.36f74e17@posting.google.com>

> Summary Announcements
> =====================
> I don't think my informal editors on python-dev often enough for their 
> help.

That should read "I don't *thank* my informal editors", not "think". 
I added that bit just before I sent out the final version and thus it
was never checked by anyone.  I am not kidding when I say I don't
proof-read anything.  =)

-Brett
From Felix.Wiemann at gmx.net  Thu Jul 29 21:18:39 2004
From: Felix.Wiemann at gmx.net (Felix Wiemann)
Date: Mon Aug  2 02:35:41 2004
Subject: Docutils 0.3.5 released
Message-ID: <87smbatyeo.fsf@news2.ososo.de>

=========================
 Docutils 0.3.5 released
=========================

Docutils 0.3.5 has just been released.  We recommend all users to
upgrade to version 0.3.5.


Download
========

You can download the release package from:
http://prdownloads.sourceforge.net/docutils/docutils-0.3.5.tar.gz?download


What's New
==========

Major changes since Docutils 0.3.3 include:

* improved, extended and reorganized documentation;
  see <http://docutils.sourceforge.net/docs/index.html>.
* new csv-table directive
* many minor improvements, additions and bug fixes

See the HISTORY at <http://docutils.sourceforge.net/0.3.5/HISTORY.html>
for a detailed list of changes.


What is Docutils?
=================

Docutils is a modular system for processing documentation
into useful formats, such as HTML, XML, and LaTeX.  For
input Docutils supports reStructuredText, an easy-to-read,
what-you-see-is-what-you-get plaintext markup syntax.


Useful Resources
================

* The Docutils website: http://docutils.sourceforge.net
* The reStructuredText homepage: http://docutils.sf.net/rst.html
* The Docutils FAQ: http://docutils.sourceforge.net/FAQ.html
* Known Bugs: http://docutils.sourceforge.net/BUGS.html#known-bugs


Discussion
==========

Please direct any discussion to <docutils-users@lists.sourceforge.net>.


-- 
Felix Wiemann -- http://www.ososo.de/

From tismer at stackless.com  Fri Jul 30 03:08:49 2004
From: tismer at stackless.com (Christian Tismer)
Date: Mon Aug  2 02:35:42 2004
Subject: Ann: Revival of the BytecodeHacks
Message-ID: <41099FA1.7000507@stackless.com>

Dear community,

I could not resist to do this announcement, although
this project belongs to Michael Hudson.
Mike, please forgive me. I owe you a beer.

In a single day-and-night session, I hacked against bytecodehacks,
to upgrade it from Python 1.5.2 to Python 2.3 .
This was quite some work, although not so very much, due to
the excellent basic layout which Michael created.


What are the Bytecodehacks?
---------------------------

The bytecodehacks allow you to do certain modifications to
compiled Python code objects. There are lots of applications
included, like macro expansions and function inlining,
things which Python does not provide and also is not supposed
to provide. This kind of madness exists for people who ask
for it, without worring those who don't care.

Again, this great package was written by Michael Hudson in early
2000, and to my knowledge, it was never ported to the more
recent Python versions. Michael told me that this is a package
he is no longer too fond of, since it was written in his early days.
He also told me that he is not keen on supporting it so much,
because he would be tempted to give it a whole rewrite.

Now, I'm thinking differently. I got the package to work, after
about 12 hours of hacking, and it simply works. Since I didn't
write the initial version, I have a different relationship to it.
In other words: It is easier to maintain a foreign package than
your own, since you are not married with it.


Why do I dig into foreign areas?
--------------------------------

Well, I have enough work with my Stackless package.
Stackless is almost ready. (Almost, like your toy
railway gets really ready; it really never will.)
I just built a minimum Psyco support into it, because
I'm basically always after as much speed as I can get.
But there are limits with the regular Python interpreter.

So my idea is to use these crazy other projects to get more
performance, and to support them directly.
My first idea to accelerate Psyco using Stackless was
to provide Stackless with extra hardware stacks, which can
be switched at light-speed. I still have this idea in mind,
but the implementation is not so trivial.

Comparatively, replacing generators (yield calls) with
a couple of save/restores of tuples *is* almost trivial,
as I'm probably going to show tomorrow.
In Python, these "fake-generators" would be reasonably
slower.
But, by the fact that these are then Psyco-enabled, makes
them really, really fast, and also completely inlineable.
I think to name the module "renegate". :-)


Why do I want to revive this package
------------------------------------
Well, I am a pragmatic guy, and I have a really good reason why I
need the bytecodehacks. I am writing a sophisticated package
which involves parsing of PDF files, and I want to do it all in
Python. In order to get this PDF processor to almost C speed,
I used Armin Rigo's wonderful Psyco package.
Unfortunately, Psyco has a few limitations, which act as a
show-stopper:

- generators are not supported. That means, whenever I use
   a generator, Psyco will not accelerate it, but will act as a
   small slow-down.

- Psyco is great at optimizing simple structures like lists, tuples,
   numbers and strings. It is less able to enhance things like
   object properties. Using self frequently disables almost all
   of Psyco's capabilities.

- Psyco has difficulties with inlining. Simple functions *are*
   inlined, but when they contain a conditional branch or they
   exceed some limit, inlining is disabled. This *could* be changed,
   but with a lot of effort by changing C code. This is not going to
   happen, because all of this stuff will be enhanced and
   re-implemented during the PyPy project.

Now, by combining the re-animated bytecodehacks project with
Psyco, I am almost sure that I can remove certain restrictions
from Psyco, by turning problematic Python structures into simple
ones, which the current Psyco can handle natively.


Poor man's PyPy
---------------

Although I am a member of the PyPy project, and I do belong to the
people who initiated the PyPy project, I am impatient, and I want
to get a few of the expected PyPy results right now. Psyco is
phantastic but not perfect, and it needs some help to gather maximum 
performance.
By adding Bytecodehacks in the right manner, I think I can fill
this gap. With BCH, I can replace generators by ordinary methods
of a class (plus a few bytecode instructions which have no real
Python equivalent, like goto). By inspecting the data flow of a
self.attribute, I can prove that it is invisible outside and
replace it by a simple local variable in many cases. By using
Bytecodehacks for proper inlining of functions, I can deliver
Psyco from this difficult task.


The expected result
-------------------

By consequently applying the methods I sketched above,
I expect that I can make almost every existing application
reasonably faster. I will provide this as a service for
customers and charge them for relevant acceleration.
The software will stay open-sourced. This is just a few
add-ons to Psyco and Bytecodehacks, and I'm not the author
of these. I just found out how nicely they can fit together.

My guess is an overall acceleration of at least a factor of
five for almost any native Python application. There is no proof
yet, this is all Vodoo from my stomach. But this stomach tends
to be quite reliable

Mike, please forgive me this announcement. You should have
written it, but I was so very inspired.


Getting the bytecodehacks for Python 2.3
----------------------------------------

The current source code is available at

cvs -d:pserver:anonymous@cvs.sourceforge.net:/cvsroot/bytecodehacks login

cvs -z3 -d:pserver:anonymous@cvs.sourceforge.net:/cvsroot/bytecodehacks 
co bytecodehacks

cheers -- chris
-- 
Christian Tismer             :^)   <mailto:tismer@stackless.com>
Mission Impossible 5oftware  :     Have a break! Take a ride on Python's
Johannes-Niemeyer-Weg 9a     :    *Starship* http://starship.python.net/
14109 Berlin                 :     PGP key -> http://wwwkeys.pgp.net/
work +49 30 89 09 53 34  home +49 30 802 86 56  mobile +49 173 24 18 776
PGP 0x57F3BF04       9064 F4E1 D754 C2FF 1619  305B C09C 5A3B 57F3 BF04
      whom do you want to sponsor today?   http://www.stackless.com/


From rickh at ispwest.com  Fri Jul 30 20:38:03 2004
From: rickh at ispwest.com (Rick Hilburger)
Date: Mon Aug  2 02:35:42 2004
Subject: A Python preprocessor that has automatic flowcharting
Message-ID: <cee4po044h@enews4.newsguy.com>

My new non-profit web site is  www.getcet.org

It's about automatic flow chart generation.  I have a program that
automatically draws a flow chart next to Python code so that you can see and
understand the flow among the lines of Python code.  I use a slightly
different syntax for flow control than Python does, but the rest is regular
Python.  I have numerous images to illustrate this.  I think it would be a
new way to have code that is somewhat self-documenting.  It could also help
Python be somewhat self-teaching, at least with respect to structured
control constructs and how they work.