[Python-3000] status (preparing for first alpha)

Py3k is progressing nicely. We are planning the first alpha sometime this week. The tests are mostly passing. With all the churn over the last week, I'm sure it's about to change. :-) AFAIK, nearly all the tests pass on Linux and Mac OS X. There was a report that Windows/VC8 was able to build python but it crashed in test_builtin. Can anyone confirm this? Here are the tasks that we need help with before the alpha is released: * Verify Windows build works with VC7 (currently the default compiler for 2.5) * Verify Windows build passes all tests * Verify other Unix builds work and pass all tests * Fix reference leaks probably related to IO * Fix problem with signal 32 on old gentoo box (new IO related?) See below for more details about many of these. The string/unicode merge is making good progress. There are less than 400 references to PyString. Most of the references are in about 5-10 modules. Less than 50 modules in the core have any references to PyString. We still need help converting over to use unicode. If you are interested in helping out, the spreadsheet is the best place to look for tasks: http://spreadsheets.google.com/ccc?key=pBLWM8elhFAmKbrhhh0ApQA&hl=en_US&pli=1 Separate sheets exist for C, Python, Writing, and Reading tasks. You can review the 3.0 docs at: http://docs.python.org/dev/3.0/ They are updated every 12 hours. There are many parts which need improvement. There are 4 tests that report reference leaks: test_io leaked [62, 62] references test_urllib leaked [122, 122] references test_urllib2_localnet leaked [3, 3] references test_xmlrpc leaked [26, 26] references On the gentoo machine that builds the docs, I would like to run the tests. 2.x is currently running python without a problem. In 3.0, there is a strange error about receiving an Unknown signal 32. I'm guessing this is related to the new IO library, but that's really a guess. Does anyone have a clue about what's happening here? I don't think I can catch the signal (I tried). Part of the reason I suspect IO is that the problem seems to occur while running various tests that use sockets. test_poplib is often the first one. But even if that's skipped many other tests can cause the problem, including: test_queue test_smtplib test_socket test_socket_ssl test_socketserver. Perhaps there's a test that triggers the problem and almost any other test seems to be causing the problem? There are some unexplained oddities. The most recent issue I saw was this strange exception while running the tests: File "Lib/httplib.py", line 1157, in __init__ HTTPConnection.__init__(self, host, port, strict, timeout) TypeError: unbound method __init__() must be called with FakeHTTPConnection instance as first argument (got HTTPSConnection instance instead) I've seen this exactly once. I don't know what happened. Completely unrelated, I also had a problem with using uninitialized memory from test_bytes. That also only happened once. It could have been a problem with an underlying library. n