PEP: 320 Title: Python 2.4 Release Schedule Version: $Revision$ Author: Barry Warsaw and Raymond Hettinger Status: Incomplete Type: Informational Created: 29-Jul-2003 Python-Version: 2.4 Post-History: 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 is not yet fixed but a rough target for the first alpha is July 2004. land generator expressions -- first week of May (this PEP seems to be the largest potential source of upheaval, so it should go in well before the alpha release). alpha 1 -- second week of July 2004 alpha 2 -- four weeks later beta 1 -- TBD (perhaps August) depending on the number of bugs in the alphas. final -- September? This will depend on how the alphas and betas go, and might be pushed back if several rounds of bugfixing are needed. Release Manager Anthony Baxter Completed features for 2.4 PEP 218 Builtin Set Objects. PEP 289 Generator expressions. PEP 322 Reverse Iteration. PEP 327: A Decimal package for fixed precision arithmetic. 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. Planned features for 2.4 PEP 292 Simpler String Substitutions to be implemented as a module. PEP 318: Function/method decorator syntax PEP 328: Imports: Multi-line and Absolute/Relative. (Still quite controversial.) 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 (www.python.org/sf/579435) 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: if this branch can land in the trunk by early May, it can go in. Otherwise it can wait for a future release. This will not be in 2.4, but will land on the trunk some time after 2.4 final is out, for inclusion in 2.5. 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. (SF 683658.) - 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. (SF 633930. I'm no longer certain this is easy or even right.) - 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.) - Decide on a clearer deprecation policy (especially for modules) and act on it. For a start, see this message from Neil Norwitz: http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2002-April/023165.html 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: http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2002-May/024346.html 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? http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2002-May/023926.html http://www.python.org/sf/558745 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. Copyright This document has been placed in the public domain. Local Variables: mode: indented-text indent-tabs-mode: nil End: