Romanian and Simplified Chinese Translations

The Python Insider team is very excited to announce two new blogs today. Translators for Romanian and Simplified Chinese have joined the Translation Project, and have already started publishing the backlog of posts. As with the other translations, these parallel editions may lag slightly behind the original posts on Python Insider.

Jython Migrates to Mercurial

Jython has finally migrated from Subversion to Mercurial. This has been a long time coming: unfortunately we had a difficult Subversion repo that took some effort to cleanly convert to a different revision control system.

The new official Jython repo is now hosted @

http://hg.python.org/jython

with a BitBucket Mirror for easy forking.

There's also a larger read-only repo with ongoing feature branches (converted to Mercurial Bookmarks) hosted at http://hg.python.org/jython-fullhistory

Mercurial makes it even easier to contribute to Jython, pull up a fork and come help us build Jython 2.6!

Python 3.3 to Drop Support for OS/2, Windows 2000, and VMS

Every so often there comes a time to prune the list of supported operating systems to match the usage landscape. On top of that, the pool of contributing developers on a platform also holds significance, as there needs to be someone around to complete development tasks in order to have a quality release. Other factors, such as the age of an operating system and its hinderance on future development work, also weigh on the list.

Victor Stinner recently proposed dropping OS/2 and VMS support for CPython, a year after his original question on OS/2 support. Victor's original inquiry came around the time of his seemingly non-stop Unicode efforts, specifically for an issue with os.execvpe() supporting environment variables via the PEP 383 surrogateescape handler. OS/2 and VMS currently have no representation on the development team and receive no testing during the release process.

The process of writing this post got me thinking about a previous discussion about removing Windows 2000, which seemed to fall to the wayside. Systems setting COMSPEC to command.com were also supposed to be on the chopping block back then. As of now, both have joined OS/2 and VMS. Windows 2000 is up for removal in order to make development work easier, removing the need to account for legacy APIs on an operating system which hit end-of-life in 2010.

In order to begin removing support for those systems, Victor and I started by updating PEP 11.

PEP 11

This PEP outlines the operating systems that are no longer supported and explains the process of adding a system to that list.

Once it is decided that an operating system can start the process of removal, it is formally announced as unsupported. This announcement traditionally goes for the in-development version, so dropping support of OS/2, Windows 2000, and VMS begins with Python 3.3.

The first stage is fairly hands off, more of a raising of the white flag. It's a signal that there's no one around to maintain the code and ensure a quality release. Changes to compilation and installation may be made to alert users on those platforms that the platform is unsupported. A note will go into the "What's New" document listing the newly unsupported platforms.

After a release cycle of being unsupported, the version afterwards becomes fair game for removal of code. In this case, code can be removed in 3.4. There probably won't be a wholesale removal of that code, but developers that come across it in their normal work may remove any #ifdef blocks, configure sections, or out-of-date code.

What You Can Do

If you are a user of OS/2 or VMS, there are a few things you can do to save your platform.

Become a Maintainer

Nothing says support better than an active developer. Andrew MacIntyre has been the OS/2 maintainer for some time now, and he stated during Victor's first OS/2 query that OS/2 is behind on Unicode support, so that's certainly an area that needs focus. VMS appears to have some amount of external support via http://www.vmspython.org, but as discussed in issue 11918, someone needs to step up to allow the continued VMS support upstream.

If you are interested in taking over for either platform, see the developer's guide for the current development proccesses.

Contribute a build slave

With an active developer, a platform stands a better chance of survival. With a build slave, a platform stands an even better chance, not only at survival but also at quality.

Python uses Buildbot for continuous integration, and build slaves are currently provided for Linux, Mac, Windows, and Open Indiana (Solaris), for various versions, architectures, and configurations. Being able to donate a machine to the build fleet for OS/2 or VMS would allow those platforms to receive the same attention that more mainstream platforms receive.

If you can donate either time or hardware to help keep OS/2 and VMS alive, contact the python-dev mailing list to coordinate your efforts.

Python Insider Translation Project

We think the content of this blog is useful for the whole Python community, so reaching as many people as we can is one of our priorities. To expand our reach, we have assembled a team of translators to create parallel editions of the blog in other languages. We are launching two translations today: Japanese and Spanish.

The translations will lag a little behind the posts on Python Insider, but try to keep more or less up to date.

Help Wanted

The translation team is still very small, so we are looking for more people to join. We need people able to work on the existing languages, or to help us expand to other languages. If you can help in either way, contact Doug Hellmann (doug dot hellmann at gmail).

Meet the Team: Brian Curtin

This post is part of the "Meet the Team" series of posts, which is meant to give a brief introduction to the Python core development team.

Name:	Brian Curtin
Location:	Chicago, IL
Home Page:	http://blog.briancurtin.com/

How long have you been using Python?

On a day to day basis going on 6 years. Prior to that I used it occasionally for a class in college and also at a summer internship.

How long have you been a core committer?

Just over a year. March 24 marked my first year with the group.

How did you get started as a core developer? Do you remember your first commit?

I got started after noticing a documentation bug while writing an extension module at work, then I submitted a simple patch and Georg Brandl committed it almost immediately. After having that quick success and a fresh source checkout, I wanted to dive in and learn more about the modules I was using and ended up writing a patch to add context manager support to zipfile.

The first few commits I made were documentation fixes in order to keep it simple early on. My first code commit was to add a few features and expand test coverage in the winreg module.

Which parts of Python are you working on now?

As one of the few Windows users involved in CPython development, I try to keep an eye on whatever issues Windows users are having. Due to that, I've had a chance to work on a bunch of the standard library, including modules I hadn't used. I haven't done much with the interpreter itself, but I'm looking to change that.

What do you do with Python when you aren't doing core development work?

I build a variety of test tools for a trading database which is written in C++. There's an extension module for the data API so we can easily write regression tests, performance tests, and we're always trying to build more.

What do you do when you aren't programming?

I'm a huge baseball fan. I umpire college baseball in the spring, various leagues in the summer, and mix in watching and going to Chicago Cubs games.

Meet the Team: Nick Coghlan

This post is part of the "Meet the Team" series of posts, which is meant to give a brief introduction to the Python core development team.

Name:	Nick Coghlan
Location:	Brisbane, Australia
Home Page:	http://www.boredomandlaziness.org

How long have you been using Python?

First encountered 1.5.2 around 1999 when our lecturer used it for a networking course. Started using 2.2 professionally for automated testing around 2002 and never looked back.

How long have you been a core committer?

Guido gave me access in 2005 to update PEP 343 (primarily ditching the context method)

How did you get started as a core developer? Do you remember your first commit?

As far as contributing patches goes, I had 3 months off in 2004 and spent a bunch of it working with Raymond and Facundo on the decimal module, primarily running the telco benchmarks and finding ways to speed up the code. A few of the stranger hacks in the decimal module (like the fast path for checking for special cases and the use of strings when converting tuples of digits to integers) stem from that time.

My actual first commit would have been to PEP 343, and then after that probably to the AST compiler branch as we finished it up for inclusion in 2.5.

Which parts of Python are you working on now?

runpy, functools and contextlib are the main things that tend to end up in my inbox. I also keep an eye on what Brett and Victor are doing with import, what Raymond is doing with collections and itertools, and anything that happens to the compiler. I'm also fascinated by the cultural side of things.

What do you do with Python when you aren't doing core development work?

Not a great deal, actually. The Python stuff at work generally just ticks away doing its thing, so there isn't a lot of call to hack on it at the moment. I do want to do something to tidy up my digital music library, but the scripts for that are just a hack job at the moment.

What do you do when you aren't programming?

Tae kwon do, computer gaming, soccer, reading, etc, etc...

New Blog Design

If you read Python Insider through a feed reader, you may not have seen the new page design Marcin Wojtczuk created for us. It looks great while maintaining a lightweight feel, and we couldn't be happier with the results.

Thank you for your time and efforts, Marcin!