PyDev Summary for week ending 20-Oct-2002

[Raymond Hettinger]

I'm filling in while Brett is on vacation.  To make everyone 
appreciate his formatting and lucidity, I'll skip the 
reStructuredText and write in my own terse style.


http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2002-October/029577.html
Python 2.2.2. was released in final form this week.  Oh, yeah!

http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2002-October/029527.html
Why does the Window's installer use shortened 8.3 pathnames?
Answer:  It doesn't have to, but it is less confusing than dealing
with pathnames that can have embedded spaces.

http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2002-October/029544.html
PEP 218 was updated to match the sets.py module in CVS for Python 2.3.
The question arose as to whether immutable sets should be implemented
in C as a separate type or whether mutability should be a property.
Answer:  Keep them as different types since they support different
methods.  Next question:  Should there be a separate language syntax
for the two different types.  Answer:  Probably not, leave as an open
question in the PEP.

http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2002-October/029542.html
The -U flag was put in to test the Python standard lib for being able 
to handle Unicode seamlessly.  It remained undocumented so that bug
reports wouldn't pile up while the issues were being worked out.
Progress is being made but it is possible the -U flag will never be
fully implemented and released as a documented feature.  

http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2002-October/029535.html
Python has more than one place that is vulnerable to 32 bit word 
overflows unless a bunch of tests are put in place to catch unusual 
highly contrived cases that never come up in real world examples.  
Since the fixes would be ugly, wordy, and slow, it was decided to
leave them alone.

http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2002-October/029024.html
Tcl 8.0 and 8.1 are ancient history except in the world of Cygwin
which is currently stuck with 8.0.  Accordingly, Python 2.3's support
for the prior versions has been cleaned out and support for 
UCS-4 in _tkinter has been added.

http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2002-October/029591.html
Getting mtime, atime, and ctime to return floats instead of ints seemed
like a simple enough change.  Much discussion was held on how to
accommodate the change without breaking anything that relied on
the type.  Though breakage would've been rare (since the only normal
use for the data is to compare it or print it), Guido proposed a solution
(putting the ints in the tuple) that seemed to accommodate all practical
cases.

http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2002-October/029679.html
Brian Quinlan teasesd out the design issues behind proxies and 
weakref objects.