[Python-Dev] status of development documentation

[Tim Peters]

Santa sent me a bad-mood elf overnight, apparently just to motivate me ;-)

Since it's 2+ months after the fact, I doubt we'll ever know exactly
what went wrong here.  In outline:

Rev 39758 (the AST merge) left pythoncore.vcproj in an unusable state.
 That's the VC 7.1 project file that defines what goes into the core
Python DLL on Windows, and it was checked in with conflict markers
embedded.  VC couldn't load the resulting mess, so the Python DLL
couldn't be built anymore.

In rev 39791, MarkH removed the conflict markers and added
parsermodule.c (which had somehow gotten lost during the merge). 
Python then compiled again under VC7.1.  But looks like he didn't run
the tests -- or, like me, just assumed that all the test failures he
saw were universally-known breakage from the then-still-early days of
the AST merge (since most were obviously failures to compile
correctly, that was a tempting assumption).

It sat there then for two months.

As things turn out, rev 39758 also damaged pythoncore.vcproj in other,
non-syntactic ways:

- It removed tokenizer.c from the core DLL, but that's the correct
runtime tokenizer
  code.

- It added pgen.c and tokenizer_pgen.c to the core DLL.  The former is useless
  in the core DLL (I think), and including the latter was just wrong.

RaymondH would not have noticed anything wrong because he still runs
with VC6, and the AST merge didn't muck with _those_ project files.

Anyway, after removing pgen.c and tokenizer_pgen.c, and adding
tokenizer.c, test_builtin and test_pep263 pass again.  In fact, all
the -uall tests pass again (yippee!):

264 tests OK.
38 tests skipped:
    test__locale test_aepack test_al test_applesingle test_bsddb185
    test_cd test_cl test_commands test_crypt test_curses test_dbm
    test_dl test_fcntl test_fork1 test_gdbm test_gl test_grp
    test_hashlib_speed test_imgfile test_ioctl test_linuxaudiodev
    test_macfs test_macostools test_mhlib test_nis test_openpty
    test_ossaudiodev test_plistlib test_poll test_posix test_pty
    test_pwd test_resource test_scriptpackages test_signal
    test_sunaudiodev test_threadsignals test_timing
Those skips are all expected on win32.

So, Merry Christmas to all, and there's no longer any reason to
deprive yourself of the joy of upgrading to Windows ;-)