[Python-Dev] Changing existing class instances

[Tim Peters]

[Barry A. Warsaw]
> I completely agree.

That's no fun <wink>.

> I think in general, such long running apps are rare,

By definition, they're non-existent under Windows <0.7 wink>.  But it
depends on which field you're working in.  The closer you get to being part
of a business or consumer service, the more important it gets; e.g., I've
seen serious RFQs for software systems guaranteed to suffer no more than 5
minutes of downtime per *year* (& stiff penalties for failure to meet that).
I've never been on the winning end of such an RFQ, so am not sure what it
takes to meet it.

It's interesting to ponder.  Psion has published a little about the software
techniques they use in their PDAs (my Psion 3a's remarkably capable "Agenda"
app has been running non-stop for a bit over 3 years!).

> and in those cases you probably want to be explicit about when
> and how the updates occur anyway.

My guess is you'd want to be *paranoidly* explicit, leaving nothing to
chance.

> The one place where automatic updates would be convenient would
> be at the interactive prompt, so it might be nice to add a
> module that could be imported by PYTHONSTARTUP, and play hook
> games to enable automatic updates.

Returning the favor, I completely agree.  The single thing people at work
gripe most about is how to do development under IDLE in such a way that
their package-laden systems exhibit the hoped-for changes in response to
editing a module deep in the bowels of the system.  I don't have a *good*
answer to that now; reduced to stuff like writing custom scripts to
selectively clear out sys.modules.

non-stop-ly y'rs  - tim