Python 1.6 alpha 1 released

[Steve Holden]

Patrick Phalen wrote:
> 
> [Vladimir Ulogov and Bjorn Pettersen's posts quoted]
> 
> Well, these two posts have scratching my head. What sort of
> environment are you two (Vladimir & Bjorn) working in that makes it
> seem so onerous to fix your sock.connect() syntax (considering that
> you literally have months to prepare for it)?
> 
Probably one that likes to move forwards rather than hang around
fixing regression-testing errors induced by language changes :-)

> After all, this isn't like the multi-argument append issue, which defies
> even Tim Peters' estimable skills with regular expressions to arrive at
> a surefire "nanny" treatment. We're just talking about a simple string
> replacement here!
> 
Sadly all the cases Tim quoted which made multi-argument append hard
to detect (especially function assignment) apply here too.  While many
cases will be detectable by string scanning, it's not possible to detect
all possible cases easily.

> In my own case, I administer around 12 servers, geographically
> dispersed around the U.S, plus the workstations in my office. All have
> various Python scripts running on them. Long ago, I hacked a simple
> string replacement script in Python, which takes a directory and two
> strings as arguments and which walks that directory tree replacing one
> string with the other. I have this script on all 12 servers, since I use
> it all the time.
> 
I am sure this is useful.  But even when you've fixed all the cases you
find, surely you have to at least apply a set of standard regression tests
to ensure compatibility?

> Now, I expect it will take me all of 15-20 minutes, total, to
> find and "fix" any such problems on these 12 servers. I know I'll need
> to also fix some other situations where long int "L" is manually
> truncated. Big deal. Since I have 2-3 months warning on this, I feel
> fairly confident I am up to this challenge. In fact, I expect it
> will take me less time to fix sock.connect() than to reply to your
> posts. ;-)
> 
Very gung-ho!

> I must be missing something. Is your situation somehow much more
> complex than that? If so, I'd be curious to know how and why.
> 
I can't comment on others' situations.  Fortunately I'm new enough to
Python that I don't have major systems depending on the language ... yet.

> And as for asking Guido to change his mind ... heh, that was a little
> joke, right?

Seems to me that a legitimate concern has been raised.  There have been
responses which complained about the *tone* of the original posts, but
the bottom line is that this change will require fixes to installed code.
Alpha is surely a better time to discuss this than when the final release
comes along?

Maybe someone could borrw the time machine and visit the future to let us
know how this one is going to come out? :-)

regards
 Steve
--
"Bulding information systems just because it's fun."
Steve Holden  sholden at bellatlantic.net  703 716 7275