Category: technology

Python Steering Council 3.0

Written by Barry Warsaw in technology on Thu 05 November 2020. Tags: python,

With the release of Python 3.9, the first of its kind on the new annual release cadence, it is time once again for Python Steering Council elections. This will be the third edition of the Steering Council under the new governance model adopted by the Python core developers after Guido retired as BDFL.

I have served on both previous Steering Councils, and am self-nominating for a third term.

I have been deeply involved in Python since 1994. In fact, I learned that I was the first non-Dutch contributor to Python! I attended the first workshop (long before Pycons) back in November 1994 along with 20 other early enthusiasts. I met Guido at that workshop; I've loved Python as a language and community ever since, and I value Guido as a close personal friend. Somehow, I was immortalized as the Friendly Language Uncle For Life (the FLUFL), and that being a title that comes with no responsibilities, it's good to see that humor has never really left the language named after a British comedy troop.

The Python Steering Council (SC) has an important constitutional role in the evolution of the language, and works closely with the Python Software Foundation to ensure the ongoing health and vibrancy of the larger Python community. The five members of the SC meet weekly, and are usually joined by Ewa Jodlowska, the PSF's Executive Director. Although not required by the bylaws, Ewa's attendance is highly valued by the SC. She represents the PSF and graciously takes meeting notes, which eventually get submitted to the SC's private git repo, and distilled into public reports to the community. Occasionally we'll invite guests to come and chat with us about various topics.

We have a fairly wide agenda. A core constitutional requirement is to adjudicate on Python Enhancement …

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How macOS Broke Python

Written by Barry Warsaw in technology on Tue 27 November 2018. Tags: python, macos,

Here's a common Python idiom that is broken on macOS 10.13 and beyond:

import os, requests

pid = os.fork()
if pid == 0:
    # I am the child process.
    requests.get('https://www.python.org')
    os._exit(0)
else:
    # I am the parent process.
    do_something()

Now, it's important to stress that this particular code sample may execute just fine. It's an excerpt from some code at work that illustrates a deeper problem that you may or may not encounter in real-world applications. We've seen it crash reproducibly, resulting in core dumps of the Python process, with potentially disk filling dump files in /cores.

In this article, I hope to explain what I know about this problem, with links to information elsewhere on the 'net. Some of those resources include workarounds, but in my experiments, those are not completely reliable in eliminating the core dumps. I'll explain why I think that is.

It's important to stress that at the time of this article's publishing, I do not have a complete solution, and am not even sure one exists. I'll note further that this is not specifically a Python problem and in fact has been described within the Ruby community. It is endemic to common idioms around the use of fork() without exec*() in scripting languages, and is caused by changes in the Objective-C runtime in macOS 10.13 High Sierra and beyond. It can also be observed in certain "prefork" servers.

What is forking?

I won't go into much detail on this, since any POSIX programmer should be well acquainted with the fork(2) system call, and besides, there are tons of other good resources on the 'net that explain fork(). For our purposes here, it's enough to know that fork() is a relatively inexpensive way to make an exact copy of …

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Sparse files with Python

Written by Barry Warsaw in technology on Sat 14 January 2017. Tags: linux, python,

For a project at work we create sparse files, which on Linux and other POSIX systems, represent empty blocks more efficiently. Let's say you have a file that's a gibibyte [1] in size, but which contains mostly zeros, i.e. the NUL byte. It would be inefficient to write out all those zeros, so file systems that support sparse files actually just write some metadata to represent all those zeros. The real, non-zero data is then written wherever it may occur. These sections of zero bytes are called "holes".

Sparse files are used in many situations, such as disk images, database files, etc. so having an efficient representation is pretty important. When the file is read, the operating system transparently turns those holes into the correct number of zero bytes, so software reading sparse files generally don't have to do anything special. They just read data as normal, and the OS gives them zeros for the holes.

You can create a sparse file right from the shell:

$ truncate -s 1000000 /tmp/sparse

Now /tmp/sparse is a file containing one million zeros. It actually consumes almost no space on disk (just some metadata), but for most intents and purposes, the file is one million bytes in size:

$ ls -l /tmp/sparse
-rw-rw-r-- 1 barry barry 1000000 Jan 14 11:36 /tmp/sparse
$ wc -c /tmp/sparse
1000000 /tmp/sparse

The commands ls and wc don't really know or care that the file is sparse; they just keep working as if it weren't.

But, sometimes you do need to know that a file contains holes. A common case is if you want to copy the file to some other location, say on a different file system. A naive use of cp will fill in those holes, so a command like this …

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Building Debian packages with local dependencies

Written by Barry Warsaw in technology on Mon 28 November 2016. Tags: ubuntu, debian, packaging,

Way back in 2011 I wrote an article describing how you can build Debian packages with local dependencies for testing purposes. An example would be a new version of a package that has new dependencies. Or perhaps the new dependency isn't available in Debian yet. You'd like to test both packages together locally before uploading. Using sbuild and autopkgtest you can have a high degree of confidence about the quality of your packages before you upload them.

Here I'll describe some of the improvements in those tools, and give you simplified instructions on how to build and test packages with local dependencies.

What's changed?

Several things have changed. Probably the biggest thing that simplifies the procedure is that GPG keys for your local repository are no longer needed.

Another thing that's improved is the package testing support. It used to be that packages could only be tested during build time, but with the addition of the autopkgtest tool, we can also test the built packages under various scenarios. This is important because it more closely mimics what your package's users will see. One thing that's cool about this for Python packages is that autopkgtest runs an import test of your package by default, so even if you don't add any explicit tests, you still get something. Of course, if you do want to add your own tests, you'll need to recreate those default tests, or check out the autodep8 package for some helpers.

I've moved the repository of scripts over to git.

The way you specify the location of the extra repositories holding your local debs has changed. Now, instead of providing a directory on the local file system, we're going to fire up a simple Python-based HTTP server and use that as a new repository URL. This won't be …

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Kiwi PyCon 2016, Pt I

Written by Barry Warsaw in technology on Mon 19 September 2016. Tags: python, travel,

In early September 2016 I traveled to New Zealand to give a keynote speech for Kiwi PyCon 2016. I was very honored to be invited, and glad that after 4 years of valiant resistance, I finally gave in to my thankfully diligent colleague Thomi Richards. My wife Jane and I made the 25+ hour journey, and had a wonderful little vacation after the conference.

Here in part I, I'll talk a bit about the conference and my keynote. Later in part II, I'll talk about the vacation part of the trip. I might sprinkle little impressions of New Zealand throughout both articles.

Getting there

In some ways, it's a good thing that New Zealand is so far from the USA, with an additional transcontinental trip away from the east coast. During our summer, it's their winter and they are 16 hours ahead of UTC-4. Meaning that at noon New York time, it's 4am the next day in New Zealand. Or, to put it another way, 8am New Zealand time is 4pm New York time the previous day. I never got tired of the joke with family back home that we were living in the future over there.

So it's definitely a commitment to get there, which makes it all the more breathtaking I think. In a way, New Zealand feels exotic because the first thing that most Americans probably think of when they hear "New Zealand" is the "Lord of the Rings" movies. But New Zealand is a high-tech country, with a low population (under 5 million people in total) concentrated in four major cities (Auckland, Christchurch, Dunedin, and Wellington), lots of sheep and some of the nicest people you'll meet in the English speaking world. They have a real sense of stewardship for their land and environment, as getting …

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We Fear Change returns

Written by Barry Warsaw in technology on Mon 25 April 2016. Tags: blogging,

I'm back! This time, I'm using the very awesome Pelican publishing platform, as Blogger just got to be too much of a pain to use. Let's hope that the simplicity of using reStructuredText, static pages, and outsourcing discussions will make it so easy to blog that I actually keep doing it. I've slapped together a basic theme, but no doubt I'll be tweaking it as time goes on. For now, the theme isn't in a public repository. A quick shout out to Font Awesome and font-linux for their very cool font icons.

I do intend to expand the themes I blog about. I'll still focus on Python and GNU Mailman as well as other technology, but now I'll include tai chi, music, and anything else that I feel the overwhelming urge to share. I hope I can continue to present my thoughts in a respectful, positive, all-inclusive voice.

I've migrated most of the pages from the old Blogger platform, and done some minor updating as appropriate. One of the main reasons I've moved off of Blogger was because of the pain of moderating comments. There was just too much spam. I've switched to the third party discussion platform Disqus and I've tried to import all the non-spammy original comments. I'm not sure I've done that correctly, but we'll see!

You can contact me via the Social links in the side bar, and via the various public mailing lists and IRC channels I hang out in. I hope to hear from you!


Creating Python snaps

Written by Barry Warsaw in technology on Thu 02 April 2015. Tags: debugging, python, python3, ubuntu,

Background

Snappy Ubuntu Core is a new edition of the Ubuntu you know and love, with some interesting new features, including atomic, transactional updates, and a much more lightweight application deployment story than traditional Debian/Ubuntu packaging. Much of this work grew out of our development of a mobile/touch based version of Ubuntu for phones and tablets, but now Ubuntu Core is available for clouds and devices.

I find the transactional nature of upgrades to be very interesting. While you still get a perfectly normal Ubuntu system, your root file system is read-only, so traditional apt-get based upgrades don't work. Instead, your system version is image based; today you are running image 231 and tomorrow a new image is released to get you to 232. When you upgrade to the new image, you get all the system changes. We support both full and delta upgrades (the latter which reduces bandwidth), and even phased updates so that we can roll out new upgrades and quickly pull them from the server side if we notice a problem. Snappy devices even support rolling back upgrades on a single device, by using a dual-partition root file system. Phones generally don't support this due to lack of available space on the device.

Of course, the other part really interesting thing about Snappy is the lightweight, flexible approach to deploying applications. I still remember my early days learning how to package software for Debian and Ubuntu, and now that I'm both an Ubuntu Core Developer and Debian Developer, I understand pretty well how to properly package things. There's still plenty of black art involved, even for relatively easy upstream packages such as distutils/setuptools-based Python packages available on the Cheeseshop (er, PyPI). The Snappy approach on Ubuntu Core is much more lightweight and easy, and …

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Resource management in Python 3.3, or contextlib.ExitStack FTW!

Written by Barry Warsaw in technology on Fri 10 May 2013. Tags: python, python3, ubuntu,

I'm writing a bunch of new code these days for Ubuntu Touch's Image Based Upgrade system. Think of it essentially as Ubuntu Touch's version of upgrading the phone/tablet (affectionately called phablet) operating system in a bulk way rather than piecemeal apt-get s the way you do it on a traditional Ubuntu desktop or server. One of the key differences is that a phone has to detour through a reboot in order to apply an upgrade since its Ubuntu root file system is mounted read-only during the user session.

Anyway, those details aren't the focus of this article. Instead, just realize that because it's a pile of new code, and because we want to rid ourselves of Python 2, at least on the phablet image if not everywhere else in Ubuntu, I am prototyping all this in Python 3, and specifically 3.3. This means that I can use all the latest and greatest cool stuff in the most recent stable Python release. And man, is there a lot of cool stuff!

One module in particular that I'm especially fond of is contextlib. Context managers are objects implementing the protocol behind the with statement, and they are typically used to guarantee that some resource is cleaned up properly, even in the event of error conditions. When you see code like this:

with open(somefile) as fp:
    data = fp.read()

you are invoking a context manager. Python was clever enough to make file objects support the context manager protocol so that you never have to explicitly close the file; that happens automatically when the with statement completes, regardless of whether the code inside the with statement succeeds or raises an exception.

It's also very easy to define your own context managers to properly handle other kinds of resources. I won't go …

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Python 3 Language Gotcha -- and a short reminisce

Written by Barry Warsaw in technology on Thu 18 April 2013. Tags: python, python3, ubuntu,

There's a lot of Python nostalgia going around today, from Brett Cannon's 10 year anniversary of becoming a core developer, to Guido reminding us that he came to the USA 18 years ago. Despite my stolen time machine keys, I don't want to dwell in the past, except to say that I echo much of what Brett says. I had no idea how life changing it would be -- on both a personal and professional level -- when Roger Masse and I met Guido at NIST at the first Python workshop back in November 1994. The lyric goes: what a long strange trip it's been, and that's for sure. There were about 20 people at that first workshop, and 2500 at Pycon 2013.

And Python continues to hold little surprises. Just today, I solved a bug in an Ubuntu package that's been perplexing us for weeks. I'd looked at the code dozens of times and saw nothing wrong. I even knew about the underlying corner of the language, but didn't put them together until just now. Here's a boiled down example, see if you can spot the bug!

import sys

def bar(i):
    if i == 1:
        raise KeyError(1)
    if i == 2:
        raise ValueError(2)


def bad():
    e = None
    try:
        bar(int(sys.argv[1]))
    except KeyError as e:
        print('ke')
    except ValueError as e:
        print('ve')
    print(e)

bad()

Here's a hint: this works under Python 2, but gives you an UnboundLocalError on the e variable under Python 3.

Why?

The reason is that in Python 3, the targets of except clauses are del'd from the current namespace after the try...except clause executes. This is to prevent circular references that occur when the exception is bound to the target. What is surprising and non-obvious is that the name is deleted …

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UDS Update #1 - OAuth

Written by Barry Warsaw in technology on Wed 21 November 2012. Tags: debian, python, python3, ubuntu, uds-r,

For UDS-R for Raring (i.e. Ubuntu 13.04) in Copenhagen, I sponsored three blueprints. These blueprints represent most of the work I will be doing for the next 6 months, as we're well on our way to the next LTS, Ubuntu 14.04.

I'll provide some updates to the other blueprints later, but for now, I want to talk about OAuth and Python 3. OAuth is a protocol which allows you to programmatically interact with certain website APIs, in an authenticated manner, without having to provide your website password. Essentially, it allows you to generate an authorization token which you can use instead, and it allows you to manage and share these tokens with applications, so that you can revoke them if you want, or decide how and which applications to trust to act on your behalf.

A good example of a site that uses OAuth is Launchpad, but many other sites also support OAuth, such as Twitter and Facebook.

There are actually two versions of OAuth out there. OAuth version 1 is definitely the more prevalent, since it has been around for years, is relatively simple (at least on the client side), and enshrined in RFC 5849. There are tons of libraries available that support OAuth v1, in a multitude of languages, with Python being no exception.

OAuth v2 is much less common, since it is currently only a draft specification, and has had its share of design-by-committee controversy. Still, some sites such as Facebook do require OAuth v2.

One of the very earliest Python libraries to support OAuth v1, on both the client and server side, was python-oauth (I'll use the Debian package names in this post), and on the Ubuntu desktop, you'll find lots of scripts and libraries that use python-oauth. There are major problems with …

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