Given the recent spate of successful [:SprintIntroduction: sprints], Google decided it would be a good idea to host a sprint. We've been talking about it since PyCon. Jeremy finally got the ball rolling.

We plan to hold the sprint Aug 21-24, 2006. This date should be after 2.5 is released (early August). There will be 2 locations: Google's New York City office (NYC), and Google's Mountain View, California office (MTV). Google's Open Source Program Office is doing much of the internal coordination with Jeremy Hylton and Neal Norwitz handling more of the technical side. We hope many Googlers and non-Googlers will participate. Please add your name below if you are interested.

Goals and Suggested Sprint Areas

Some suggestions:

• 2.5 bug fixing
• Cleanup for 2.6
• New features for 2.6 (PEP may be required)
  • New testing framework based on decorators (Brett Cannon)
  • Merging in memory tracking work from bcannon-sandboxing branch (Brett Cannon)
• Python 3000
• more big-memory tests for 2.5+ (dicts, unicode, array, struct)
• Cleaning and unification of package documentation
• Rewrite import in Python (Brett Cannon)
• Add your ideas here

Elaboration: The goals of the sprint have not yet been defined. We should try to fix any serious 2.5 bugs as well as cleanup the code to prepare for 2.6. Let us know if you have any questions.

Adding a possible goal: Those who have seen the [http://mrtopf.tv/vlog/ Alan Kay keynote] at [www.europython.org EuroPython 2006 @ CERN] have heard his call for Python help to the [http://laptop.org/ OLPC project]. I think this sprint could form a starting point. Those help would also lead to a very big improvement for Browser based computing, in that way giving back to the sprint sponsor.

Another goal (GvR) is Python 3000. I know some of the core developers would like to rip out more old stuff, e.g. coerce, classic classes still are not completely gone. Another relatively small project is to make it so that hash can be set to None to declare an unhashable type, and to automatically do this the first time eq or cmp are overridden but hash is not. I would also like to finish the new I/O library (at least a prototype) and start ripping out 8-bit strings, but that may be too ambitious. I know Jiwon Seo is interested in working on PEP 3102.

Attendees

• Name	Location	Dates
  Jeremy Hylton	NYC	Aug 21-24
  Neal Norwitz	NYC	Aug 21-24
  Guido van Rossum	MTV	Aug 21-24
  Thomas Wouters	NYC	Aug 21-24
  Brett Cannon	MTV	Aug 21-24
  Martin v. Löwis	NYC	Aug 22-24
  Jack Diederich	NYC	Aug 21,22
  Charles Merriam	MTV	Aug 21,22,24
  Peter Simanyi	MTV	Aug 21-24
  Alex Martelli	MTV	Aug 21-24 (half-time)
  Anna Ravenscroft	MTV	Aug 21-24 (half-time)
  Jiwon Seo	MTV	Aug 21-24?
  Brian Holmes	MTV	Aug 21-24

Food

We'll be providing lunch and dinner to our attendees and breakfast will be available from the microkitchens.

Housing - MTV

You can book a room at The Residence Inn Palo Alto/Mountain View; ask for Google's corporate rate. If you're looking to save funds, you might consider booking a penthouse room at the property and doubling up with another attendee. http://marriott.com/property/propertypage.mi?marshaCode=SFOMV

Housing - NYC

Google's preferred hotels are The Muse Hotel (http://www.themusehotel.com) and The Paramount Hotel (http://www.ianschragerhotels.com/home_search.html?paramount); ask for the Google corporate rate when booking.

Both are located within walking distance of the NYC office.

Security

We will pre-register you with security for both offices. Please make sure to get your name on the attendee list so we can get you pre-registered. More details to follow.

More on Location

New York City

1440 Broadway New York NY Connection Machine - Floor 16

Mountain View 1600 Amphitheatre Parkway, 94043 University Theatre - 2nd Flr, Building 40 Directions: [WWW] http://www.google.com/corporate/address.html#directions

(Non-Googlers: please go to the Building 40 reception and say you're a guest of Leslie Hawthorn or Guido van Rossum.)

(please note - only reserved until 2:30 PM on Thursday, 8/24 - do we need another room?)

Alex Martelli will be presenting Python 2.5 features at PENLUG in Belmont (CA) in the evening of Aug 24: see http://www.penlug.org/twiki/bin/view/Home/WebHome -- all sprint attendees are of course welcome.

Come Prepared!

Please come prepared so we won't have to waste time helping everybody with their setup. Bring a laptop (preferably running Linux or OSX; we have limited svn setup experience for other systems, esp. Windows). Make sure svn is installed: http://subversion.tigris.org/

For Python 2.5/2.6, check out the head branch; see http://www.python.org/dev/faq/#subversion-svn (use the instructions for anonymous checkout unless you already have developer privileges).

For py3k, check out the "p3yk" (sic -- the typo is historic and won't be fixed any time soon) branch. Also read PEPs 3000-3999.

In either case, make sure you have at least built and tested it once so you are familiar with the process. It's something like "./configure; make; make test" in the appropriate directory. (For Py3k, 5 or so tests typically fail -- a goal of the sprint will be to fix these.)