"If you're looking for a moderate size self-contained task, writing a
replacement for the profile and pstats modules that worked directly with
hotshot data would be a nice little project. Right now, to use hotshot data,
you have to load it up and turn it into profile-compatible data - for any
decent amount of data, this takes a _lot_ of time. Plus, the existing
profiler API is extremely unpythonic."

So said Anthony Baxter.

Note that a patch for an alternate profiler already exists: [[http://sourceforge.net/tracker/index.php?func=detail&aid=1212837&group_id=5470&atid=305470|patch #1212837]].

A replacement stats module that worked directly with hotshot would also solve the licensing issues with profile.py and pstats.py.