Python

Greets,

Well, I've been solo'ing it for over a year now, and it's definitely
time to make my presence known to the community and invite others to
participate as I can't keep putting it off as I have been. There has
always been something else that I wanted to "finish up" before making
any announcements, so I kept putting it off and putting it off. Time to
stop that. =)

For those of you who are not familiar with what I've been doing, I have
been working on a Python procedural language extension for PostgreSQL
and, furthermore, making attempts to formalize a specification of Python
interfaces to PostgreSQL elements(making a draft doc [relatively ;]
soon). It is a PgFoundry project, and I do have some information up on
the project site[1]. There are other subprojects as well as the PL, such
as layout and exceptions, which should be of interest to other
developers working on PostgresSQL related Python modules.

The backend part--the procedural language--of the project offers a
substantial number of improvements over the plpython that is currently
in core[2]. The design, in general, has a significant contrast to the
one in core, as it focuses on providing 'interfaces to' rather than
'conversions for'. While this appears to cause a larger code base, it
provides a level of flexibility that makes adaptations and improvements
trivial in many or most cases. For instance, I already have the
necessary infrastructure to support OUT parameters in a way that is
_very_ natural(tho, support for 8.1dev is not there yet; busy with other
stuff).

It, currently, is *not* my hope to eventually put this into core;
rather, I think I would like to give a try at setting a good example for
extension development. PgFoundry is a good resource, and I think it
should be exercised, as it makes a great home for projects like
this(gborg is pretty good as well! ;).(Yes, I'm +1 for, eventually,
pushing things out of core. =)

While this is not so much of a formal announcement of the
initiative/project(a formal one will eventually come to -announce and
c.l.py), it is an invitation to those interested parties on -hackers to
join the python-general list[4], which, in addition to up and coming
development releases, I hope will lead to the project becoming more
active, as opposed to me just silently hacking away. In addition, for
those who might want it, I'm open to the idea of giving admin/commit
access--especially to well known devs and members of core, so please
don't hesitate to ask.

If you are concerned about the licensing and the ambiguity of the
primary license, don't be. It is--at least meant to be--a gift license,
so I have no problems with others using the works under the BSD or MIT
licenses; this is explicitly stated/granted here[3], and a reference to
the authorization to use those substitute terms will eventually make its
way into every instrument-stamped source file.

If you want to play with what I've got so far, see the quick start[5].
It gives you some neat code, so you can play around in the interactive
console in a single-user backend to get a better feel of things. (It
should work without much/any trouble, at least on FreeBSD 5.3. If you do
have trouble don't hesitate to contact me by e-mail or on freenode where
I go by the nick 'jwp'.)

[1]http://python.projects.postgresql.org
[2]http://python.projects.postgresql.org/project/be.html
[3]http://python.projects.postgresql.org/license.html
[4]http://lists.pgfoundry.org/mailman/listinfo/python-general
[5]http://python.projects.postgresql.org/quick.html
--
Regards, James William Pye