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gmpy 1.0 for python 2.4 alpha 2 Windows-packaged

Alex Martelli aleaxit at yahoo.com
Sun Sep 5 16:36:29 EDT 2004 
Tim Peters <tim.peters at gmail.com> wrote:

> [Tim Peters, on the demise of doctest.master]
> >> Under a hopeful belief that nobody was using that anyway, I didn't
> >> gripe when Edward refactored it out of existence.  This is the first
> >> time we've heard that anyone *was* using it!
> 
> [Alex Martelli]
> > I guess gmpy just wasn't on your radar...!  If you have no need for its
> > multi-precision and special-functions support, that's unsurprising.
> 
> Since I live on Windows most of the time, I use Marc-Andre Lemburg's
> mxNumber.  That comes with a pre-built GMP, so is that much less for

So does gmpy in the prebuilt-for-Windows version, btw.  I may even have
snagged that from Marc Andre's package at some time in the past...

> me to screw up.  I generally don't run package test suites on Windows
> anyway (the odds that something is uniquely broken on my particular
> WIndows box are too low).

Hmmm -- what you mean by Windows and what I mean by Windows must be very
different OS's.  Has DLL Hell disappeared since I finally stopped
working as a Windows guru and turned to Linux, Mac OS X, OpenBSD and
other OS's...?-)


> >> I suppose we could hack one back in, but I'd rather volunteer to
> >> rewrite the gmpy tests to use the stronger 2.4 gimmicks ...
> 
> > Thanks, your offer is welcome and gladly accepted -- as long as all the
> > tests keep running under 2.3 just as well, of course.  There will be a
> > lot of 2.3 around for a long time -- for example, Apple isn't going to
> > change the Python version they use in Panther, which is 2.3, at least
> > until they come out with Tiger, say in May next year, and since, as
> > usual, they'll change $150 or so for the OS upgrade, many people will
> > just keep running Panther (and therefore Python 2.3).  Etc, etc.
> 
> Nothing against 2.3 here, it's simply a surprise that anyone was using
> doctest.master.  SourceForge is down at the moment, so I still don't
> know whether gmpy's use was essential or shallow.  If it was
> essential, we'll have to hack a master workalike back in.

Probably shallow.  Anyway, I'll be glad to mail you a gmpy package if SF
keeps giving problems, let me know!

> It could be too that many projects stumbled into using doctest.master,
> but none yet bothered to try the 2.4 prereleases.

I hadn't, for example -- even though I've been current on 2.4 for a long
time, I hadn't thought of building gmpy for it (shame on me!).


> > I do assume that it's easy to keep the hundreds of tests almost
> > unchanged, to avoid having to maintain them separately in two 
> > versions, and support 2.3 and 2.4 with localized changes to the
> > small spots where the tests are run...?
> 
> It should be easy indeed.  Edward Loper and Jim Fulton (by way of
> Zope3) had thousands of doctests between them, and Python's test suite
> has more than a few too.  None of those doctests had to be changed in
> any way.  But none of them used doctest.master.

Ah... well, let's hope my use was indeed shallow!


> This next *may* be relevant to gmpy.  I'm aware of it but haven't seen
> an instance of it:
> 
> """
> >>> 1/0
> Traceback (most recent call last):
> abc
> ZeroDivisionError: integer division or modulo by zero
> """
> 
> That doctest passes before 2.4, but no longer.  I don't want to "fix"
> that, either, if someone has code like this.
   ...
> Bottom line is that such tests (if any exist) need to be rewritten. 
> Starting the "abc" lines with one or more blanks is sufficient so that
> the test passes under all versions of doctest.

OK, inserting blanks if needed doesn't seem too difficult a fix, I
agree!


Alex
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