[Python-Dev] 2.5 status

[Neal Norwitz]

Things are getting better, but we still have some really important
outstanding issues.  PLEASE CONTINUE TESTING AS MUCH AS POSSIBLE.
Also, it would be great to use as many tools as possible to find bugs
and improve quality.  It would be especially nice to run Purify on
Windows.

I've updated PEP 356 with the current status.  The current schedule is:

    rc 1:    August 18, 2006 [planned]
    final:   September 12, 2006 [planned]

This somewhat strange schedule is to accommodate availability of
people cutting the release.  A branch will be made when the release
candidate is done.  Don't try to rush bug fixes in.  Let's try to keep
things stable.  Keep the doc fixes coming.

I believe all 3 outstanding issues (and solutions!) could use some
more discussion.  All bugs/patches blocking release are set to
priority 9.

        http://python.org/sf/1530559 - struct rejecting floats (patch pending)

        http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2006-July/067774.html
                Problem with __index__ (patch pending)

        http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2006-August/067926.html
                str/unicode dict keys can raise an exception

All the AST issues that I know about have been addressed.

There are various other issues that would be nice to fix for 2.5.
These are priority 8.  All exist in 2.4 and possibly earlier:

        http://python.org/sf/1526585 - SystemError concat long strings
        http://python.org/sf/1523610 - PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords
potential core dump
        http://python.org/sf/1517042 - Fix crashers/gc_inspection.py
        http://python.org/sf/1475523 - gettext.py bug
        http://python.org/sf/1467929 - %-formatting and dicts

I will continue to use priorities.  Please review bugs and patches and
let me know if anything else should be re-prioritized.

I will continue to stress test Python and use various tools to keep
quality up.  The current suite includes in no particular order:
valgrind, Coverity, Klocwork, failmalloc, pychecker, not to mention
the buildbot testing on commits and refleak test runs every 12 hours.

Cheers,
n