Spyced

A couple months ago, I migrated my text rpg Carnage Blender to a new server, with Ubuntu 6.06 on the new box. For an unknown reason, ftstrpnm on the new box wouldn't generate the pngs I used in my captchas. It was easier to just check in the images from the old machine into the my svn repository than debug this, so I did. The downside was that my working copy on my Windows laptop stopped being able to update from the repository. It would get to "words/con.png," and error out. Google, for once, didn't turn up anything useful. Today I got motivated. I tried all kinds of ways to get this to work. A new checkout had the same problem on Windows, but on Linux worked fine. The svn command line client for windows didn't work any better than Tortoise -- instead of "Error: Can't open file '...words\.svn\text-base\con.png.svn-base': Access is denied", it barfed con.png to stdout, and died. This was a clue, but I didn't realize that until...

I found out from Brett Cannon's blog that an abstract base clase (ABC) PEP has been accepted. I don't like this PEP. It's a very big (and more important, inelegant) change to Python's style. But my real complaint is that as big as this change is, and as much as I try to stay current with Python (subscribing to 30+ blogs) I didn't have a chance to get involved in the discussion until after the PEP was already approved. Python is big enough now that there should be some mechanism for feedback from the community before the priesthood of python-dev writes something in stone. Currently, if you want to know about PEPs before they are approved, you have to subscribe to both python-dev and python-3000 (which isn't linked from either the mailing lists page or the dev page , btw). I really don't care about the vast majority of these lists' traffic but PEPs, at least some of them, are important. If the python-dev summaries ever got updated this might be...