[Python-ideas] win32 extensions

[Massimo Di Pierro]

I would help but I do not feel competent as I am not a windows user.
For portability reasons I have had a need for:

win32con.LOCKFILE_EXCLUSIVE_LOCK
win32con.LOCKFILE_FAIL_IMMEDIATELY
win32file._get_osfhandle
win32file.LockFileEx
pywintypes.OVERLAPPED()

Although I have not used this much, the ability to talk to windows app is also useful:

import win32com.client
xl = win32com.client.Dispatch("Excel.Application")

Massimo

On Sep 13, 2011, at 11:12 PM, Nick Coghlan wrote:

> On Wed, Sep 14, 2011 at 1:19 PM, Massimo Di Pierro
> <massimo.dipierro at gmail.com> wrote:
>> For me the only reason win32 is important is to implement a cross-platform file locking.
>> I did not mean to propose web32 should be included but a portable file locking api would be useful.
> 
> If Windows developers wanted to work with Mark Hammond to figure out
> and systematically extract a core subset of stable pywin32
> functionality potentially suitable for inclusion in the standard
> library, that may not be a bad thing (there's currently already
> duplication between the two, since the stdlib needs aspects of the
> win32 API to implement modules like subprocess and multiprocessing,
> but in those cases the pywin32 version is almost always more feature
> complete).
> 
> The stdlib version could evolve as the standard library does, while
> pywin32 could move a bit quicker in responding to releases of new
> versions of Windows.
> 
> However, CPython+pywin32 suffers from the curse of being a "good
> enough" solution most of the time (especially if you start with a
> bundled installer that takes care of finding a suitable version of
> pywin32 for the version of CPython being installed).
> 
> Personally, I do think this idea has potential to be a valuable
> project, but I also think the same could be said just for helping
> pywin32 consolidate its web presence and promote itself more clearly.
> Currently, a Google search for pywin32 gives you:
> 
> ~4 hits on the SourceForge project. This is *correct*, but SF in
> general (and currently pywin32 in particular) is organised for
> existing developers, not for users or potential new developers
> (finding the latest release and being sure it *is* the latest release
> is not trivial - more on this below).
> 
> The next hit is on Mark's old starship page - that's ancient and
> hasn't been used for pywin32 downloads in years
> 
> Next we have the PyPI page, which appears to be a couple of releases
> out of date (SF has 216, PyPI has 214)
> 
> Then we have two copies of the PyPI documentation, one hosted by
> ActiveState (as part of the ActivePython 2.7 docs), the other by Tim
> Golden.
> 
> Assuming Mark was happy to go along with the idea, it would be great
> to see some real content at http://pywin32.sourceforge.net/ instead of
> the current placeholder page.
> 
> For example:
> - quick description of the project and how it can really help with
> Windows-specific development (and general Windows compatibility)
> - link directly to latest download file on Sourceforge
> - link to PyPI entry
> - link to the user mailing list (python-win32 at python.org, I believe)
> - basic instructions on how to get involved as a developer
> 
> As an even larger task, it would be great to see some Sphinx docs for
> Pywin32 that provided an overview of the various modules included in
> the package, and references out to the relevant MS documentation (as
> well as to the automatically generated documentation for pywin32
> itself).
> 
> Regards,
> Nick.
> 
> -- 
> Nick Coghlan   |   ncoghlan at gmail.com   |   Brisbane, Australia