Recent blog entries for jhylton

Certainly a lot of changes since the last diary post: Python 2.0 was released on Oct. 16. We started working for Digital Creations on Oct. 23. Still learning Zope.

Python 2.0b2 finally made it out last night, a little later in the day than I had hoped. It includes a couple of shallow bugs that were caused by last minute changes that we decided to include. They're already fixed in the CVS tree, but I guess we should have held off on those changes.

The release itself is quite good, though. There has been a major effort to reduce the number of open bug reports on SF. It was done to 50 when we issued the release, including a number of minor platform-specific issues and feature requests.

Only two more weeks until the final release!

I finally found some time to look at the archiver code for Mailman. I made a small fix to it long ago and Barry never let me forget :-).

I fixed the archiver so that it generates useful HTML pages for mail messages that use non-ASCII character sets, either in the message body or in the headers (using encoded-words). It looks like it's working; I see lots of non-Roman characters where I used to see line noise. I also spent a lot of time refactoring the code; it had far too many long methods, including several that were almost line-for-line duplicates of the same method in a superclass.

Michael Ströder pointed out that the Pisces ASN.1 parser couldn't handle X.509 certificates, because it was choking on context-specific items that had explicit tags. Fixing this bug lead to a general cleanup of the module that makes the overall workings a bit simpler. Hopefully, I'll be able release an update soon.

I finished transferring the Python bugs database from the Jitterbug server at python.org to SourceForge. The new bug tracker is a big improvement ; it is easier to browse bugs and it is possible to assign bugs to individuals for resolution.

I wrote a Python script to do the transfer. It would probably be useful to other projects migrating to SourceForge. I should post it on my Python goodies page, but I need to move my homepage to pythonlabs.com first. (I am no longer able to access python.org.)