Abstract

This document describes the development and release schedule for Python 2.4. The schedule primarily concerns itself with PEP-sized items. Small features may be added up to and including the first beta release. Bugs may be fixed until the final release.

There will be at least two alpha releases, two beta releases, and one release candidate. The release date was 30th November, 2004.

Release Manager

Anthony Baxter

Martin von Lowis is building the Windows installers, Fred the doc packages, Sean the RPMs.

Release Schedule

• July 9: alpha 1 [completed]
• August 5/6: alpha 2 [completed]
• Sept 3: alpha 3 [completed]
• October 15: beta 1 [completed]
• November 3: beta 2 [completed]
• November 18: release candidate 1 [completed]
• November 30: final [completed]

Completed features for 2.4

• PEP 218 Builtin Set Objects.
• PEP 289 Generator expressions.
• PEP 292 Simpler String Substitutions to be implemented as a module.
• PEP 318: Function/method decorator syntax, using @syntax
• PEP 322 Reverse Iteration.
• PEP 327: A Decimal package for fixed precision arithmetic.
• PEP 328: Multi-line Imports
• Encapsulate the decorate-sort-undecorate pattern in a keyword for list.sort().
• Added a builtin called sorted() which may be used in expressions.
• The itertools module has two new functions, tee() and groupby().
• Add a collections module with a deque() object.
• Add two statistical/reduction functions, nlargest() and nsmallest() to the heapq module.
• Python’s windows installer now uses MSI

Deferred until 2.5

• Deprecate and/or remove the modules listed in PEP 4 (posixfile, gopherlib, pre, others)
• Remove support for platforms as described in PEP 11.
• Finish implementing the Distutils bdist_dpkg command. (AMK)
• Add support for reading shadow passwords [1]
• It would be nice if the built-in SSL socket type could be used for non-blocking SSL I/O. Currently packages such as Twisted which implement async servers using SSL have to require third-party packages such as pyopenssl.
• AST-based compiler: this branch was not completed in time for 2.4, but will land on the trunk some time after 2.4 final is out, for inclusion in 2.5.
• reST is going to be used a lot in Zope3. Maybe it could become a standard library module? (Since reST’s author thinks it’s too instable, I’m inclined not to do this.)

Ongoing tasks

The following are ongoing TO-DO items which we should attempt to work on without hoping for completion by any particular date.

• Documentation: complete the distribution and installation manuals.
• Documentation: complete the documentation for new-style classes.
• Look over the Demos/ directory and update where required (Andrew Kuchling has done a lot of this)
• New tests.
• Fix doc bugs on SF.
• Remove use of deprecated features in the core.
• Document deprecated features appropriately.
• Mark deprecated C APIs with Py_DEPRECATED.
• Deprecate modules which are unmaintained, or perhaps make a new category for modules ‘Unmaintained’
• In general, lots of cleanup so it is easier to move forward.

Open issues

None at this time.

Carryover features from Python 2.3

• The import lock could use some redesign. [2]
• A nicer API to open text files, replacing the ugly (in some people’s eyes) “U” mode flag. There’s a proposal out there to have a new built-in type textfile(filename, mode, encoding). (Shouldn’t it have a bufsize argument too?)
• New widgets for Tkinter???

  Has anyone gotten the time for this? Are there any new widgets in Tk 8.4? Note that we’ve got better Tix support already (though not on Windows yet).

• PEP 304 (Controlling Generation of Bytecode Files by Montanaro) seems to have lost steam.
• For a class defined inside another class, the __name__ should be “outer.inner”, and pickling should work. ([3]. I’m no longer certain this is easy or even right.)
• Decide on a clearer deprecation policy (especially for modules) and act on it. For a start, see this message from Neal Norwitz [4]. There seems insufficient interest in moving this further in an organized fashion, and it’s not particularly important.
• Provide alternatives for common uses of the types module; Skip Montanaro has posted a proto-PEP for this idea [5]. There hasn’t been any progress on this, AFAICT.
• Use pending deprecation for the types and string modules. This requires providing alternatives for the parts that aren’t covered yet (e.g. string.whitespace and types.TracebackType). It seems we can’t get consensus on this.
• PEP 262 Database of Installed Python Packages (Kuchling)

  This turns out to be useful for Jack Jansen’s Python installer, so the database is worth implementing. Code will go in sandbox/pep262.

• PEP 269 Pgen Module for Python (Riehl)

  (Some necessary changes are in; the pgen module itself needs to mature more.)

• PEP 266 Optimizing Global Variable/Attribute Access (Montanaro)

  PEP 267 Optimized Access to Module Namespaces (Hylton)

  PEP 280 Optimizing access to globals (van Rossum)

  These are basically three friendly competing proposals. Jeremy has made a little progress with a new compiler, but it’s going slowly and the compiler is only the first step. Maybe we’ll be able to refactor the compiler in this release. I’m tempted to say we won’t hold our breath.

• Lazily tracking tuples? [6] [7] Not much enthusiasm I believe.
• PEP 286 Enhanced Argument Tuples (von Loewis)

  I haven’t had the time to review this thoroughly. It seems a deep optimization hack (also makes better correctness guarantees though).

• Make ‘as’ a keyword. It has been a pseudo-keyword long enough. Too much effort to bother.

References

[1]

Shadow Password Support Module https://bugs.python.org/issue579435

[2]

PyErr_Warn may cause import deadlock https://bugs.python.org/issue683658

[3]

Nested class __name__ https://bugs.python.org/issue633930

[4]

Neal Norwitz, random vs whrandom https://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2002-April/023165.html

[5]

Skip Montanaro, python/dist/src/Lib types.py,1.26,1.27 https://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2002-May/024346.html

[6]

Daniel Dunbar, Lazily GC tracking tuples https://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2002-May/023926.html

[7]

GC: untrack simple objects https://bugs.python.org/issue558745

Copyright

This document has been placed in the public domain.