PEP: 42
Title: Feature Requests
Author: Jeremy Hylton <[email protected]>
Status: Withdrawn
Type: Process
Created: 12-Sep-2000
Post-History:

. withdrawn::

  It is `obsolete`_.
  All new feature requests should  either go to the `Python bug tracker`_
  for very simple requests or the `Ideas Discourse category`_ for
  everything else.  The rest of this document is retained for historical
  purposes only.


Introduction
============

This PEP contains a list of feature requests that may be considered
for future versions of Python.  Large feature requests should not be
included here, but should be described in separate PEPs; however a
large feature request that doesn't have its own PEP can be listed here
until its own PEP is created.  See :pep:`0` for details.

This PEP was created to allow us to close bug reports that are really
feature requests.  Marked as Open, they distract from the list of real
bugs (which should ideally be less than a page).  Marked as Closed,
they tend to be forgotten.  The procedure now is:  if a bug report is
really a feature request, add the feature request to this PEP; mark
the bug as "feature request", "later", and "closed"; and add a comment
to the bug saying that this is the case (mentioning the PEP
explicitly).  It is also acceptable to move large feature requests
directly from the bugs database to a separate PEP.

This PEP should really be separated into four different categories
(categories due to Laura Creighton):

1. BDFL rejects as a bad idea.  Don't come back with it.

2. BDFL will put in if somebody writes the code.  (Or at any rate,
  BDFL will say 'change this and I will put it in' if you show up
  with code.)

  possibly divided into:

     a) BDFL would really like to see some code!

     b) BDFL is never going to be enthusiastic about this, but
        will work it in when it's easy.

3. If you show up with code, BDFL will make a pronouncement.  It might
  be ICK.

4. This is too vague.  This is rejected, but only on the grounds of
  vagueness.  If you like this enhancement, make a new PEP.


Core Language / Builtins
========================

* The parser should handle more deeply nested parse trees.

 The following will fail -- ``eval("["*50`` + ``"]"*50)`` -- because
 the parser has a hard-coded limit on stack size.  This limit should
 be raised or removed.  Removal would be hard because the current
 compiler can overflow the C stack if the nesting is too deep.

 https://bugs.python.org/issue215555

* Non-accidental IEEE-754 support (Infs, NaNs, settable traps, etc).
 Big project.

* Windows:  Trying to create (or even access) files with certain
 magic names can hang or crash Windows systems.  This is really a
 bug in the OSes, but some apps try to shield users from it.  When
 it happens, the symptoms are very confusing.

 Hang using files named prn.txt, etc https://bugs.python.org/issue481171

* eval and free variables: It might be useful if there was a way to
 pass bindings for free variables to eval when a code object with
 free variables is passed. https://bugs.python.org/issue443866

Standard Library
================

* The urllib module should support proxies which require
 authentication.  See SourceForge bug #210619 for information:

 https://bugs.python.org/issue210619

* os.rename() should be modified to handle EXDEV errors on platforms
 that don't allow rename() to operate across filesystem boundaries
 by copying the file over and removing the original. Linux is one
 system that requires this treatment.

 https://bugs.python.org/issue212317

* signal handling doesn't always work as expected.  E.g. if
 sys.stdin.readline() is interrupted by a (returning) signal
 handler, it returns "".  It would be better to make it raise an
 exception (corresponding to EINTR) or to restart.  But these
 changes would have to applied to all places that can do blocking
 interruptible I/O.  So it's a big project.

 https://bugs.python.org/issue210599

* Extend Windows utime to accept directory paths.

 https://bugs.python.org/issue214245

* Extend copy.py to module & function types.

 https://bugs.python.org/issue214553

* Better checking for bad input to ``marshal.load*().``

 https://bugs.python.org/issue214754

* rfc822.py should be more lenient than the spec in the types of
 address fields it parses.  Specifically, an invalid address of the
 form "From: Amazon.com <[email protected]>" should be
 parsed correctly.

 https://bugs.python.org/issue210678

* cgi.py's FieldStorage class should be more conservative with memory
 in the face of large binary file uploads.

 https://bugs.python.org/issue210674

 There are two issues here: first, because
 read_lines_to_outerboundary() uses readline() it is possible that a
 large amount of data will be read into memory for a binary file
 upload.  This should probably look at the Content-Type header of the
 section and do a chunked read if it's a binary type.

 The second issue was related to the self.lines attribute, which was
 removed in revision 1.56 of cgi.py (see also):

 https://bugs.python.org/issue219806

* urllib should support proxy definitions that contain just the host
 and port

 https://bugs.python.org/issue210849

* urlparse should be updated to comply with :rfc:`2396`, which defines
 optional parameters for each segment of the path.

 https://bugs.python.org/issue210834

* The exceptions raised by pickle and cPickle are currently
 different; these should be unified (probably the exceptions should
 be defined in a helper module that's imported by both). [No bug
 report; I just thought of this.]

* More standard library routines should support Unicode.  For
 example, urllib.quote() could convert Unicode strings to UTF-8 and
 then do the usual %HH conversion.  But this is not the only one!

 https://bugs.python.org/issue216716

* There should be a way to say that you don't mind if ``str()`` or
 ``__str__()`` return a Unicode string object.  Or a different function
 -- ``ustr()`` has been proposed.  Or something...

 http://sf.net/patch/?func=detailpatch&patch_id=101527&group_id=5470

* Killing a thread from another thread.  Or maybe sending a signal.
 Or maybe raising an asynchronous exception.

 https://bugs.python.org/issue221115

* The debugger (pdb) should understand packages.

 https://bugs.python.org/issue210631

* Jim Fulton suggested the following:

 ::

   I wonder if it would be a good idea to have a new kind of
   temporary file that stored data in memory unless:

   - The data exceeds some size, or

   - Somebody asks for a fileno.

   Then the cgi module (and other apps) could use this thing in a
   uniform way.

 https://bugs.python.org/issue415692

* Jim Fulton pointed out that binascii's b2a_base64() function has
 situations where it makes sense not to append a newline, or to
 append something else than a newline.

 Proposal:

 - add an optional argument giving the delimiter string to be
   appended, defaulting to "\\n"

 - possibly special-case None as the delimiter string to avoid adding
   the pad bytes too???

 https://bugs.python.org/issue415694

* pydoc should be integrated with the HTML docs, or at least be able
 to link to them.

 https://bugs.python.org/issue405554

* Distutils should deduce dependencies for .c and .h files.

 https://bugs.python.org/issue472881

* asynchat is buggy in the face of multithreading.

 https://bugs.python.org/issue595217

* It would be nice if the higher level modules (httplib, smtplib,
 nntplib, etc.) had options for setting socket timeouts.

 https://bugs.python.org/issue723287

* The curses library is missing two important calls: newterm() and
 delscreen()

 https://bugs.python.org/issue665572, http://bugs.debian.org/175590

* It would be nice if the built-in SSL socket type could be used for
 non-blocking SSL I/O.  Currently packages such as Twisted which
 implement async servers using SSL have to require third-party
 packages such as pyopenssl.

* reST as a standard library module

* The import lock could use some redesign.

 https://bugs.python.org/issue683658

* A nicer API to open text files, replacing the ugly (in some
 people's eyes) "U" mode flag.  There's a proposal out there to have
 a new built-in type textfile(filename, mode, encoding). (Shouldn't
 it have a bufsize argument too?)

* Support new widgets and/or parameters for Tkinter

* For a class defined inside another class, the __name__ should be
 "outer.inner", and pickling should work.  (GvR is no longer certain
 this is easy or even right.)

 https://bugs.python.org/issue633930

* Decide on a clearer deprecation policy (especially for modules) and
 act on it.

 https://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2002-April/023165.html

* Provide alternatives for common uses of the types module; Skip
 Montanaro has posted a proto-PEP for this idea:

 https://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2002-May/024346.html

* Use pending deprecation for the types and string modules.  This
 requires providing alternatives for the parts that aren't covered
 yet (e.g. string.whitespace and types.TracebackType). It seems we
 can't get consensus on this.

* Lazily tracking tuples?

 https://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2002-May/023926.html
 https://bugs.python.org/issue558745

* Make 'as' a keyword.  It has been a pseudo-keyword long enough.
 (It's deprecated in 2.5, and will become a keyword in 2.6.)


C API wishes
============

* Add C API functions to help Windows users who are building embedded
 applications where the FILE \* structure does not match the FILE \*
 the interpreter was compiled with.

 https://bugs.python.org/issue210821

 See this bug report for a specific suggestion that will allow a
 Borland C++ builder application to interact with a python.dll build
 with MSVC.


Tools
=====

* Python could use a GUI builder.

 https://bugs.python.org/issue210820


Building and Installing
=======================

* Modules/makesetup should make sure the 'config.c' file it generates
 from the various Setup files, is valid C. It currently accepts
 module names with characters that are not allowable in Python or C
 identifiers.

 https://bugs.python.org/issue216326

* Building from source should not attempt to overwrite the
 Include/graminit.h and Parser/graminit.c files, at least for people
 downloading a source release rather than working from Subversion or
 snapshots.  Some people find this a problem in unusual build
 environments.

 https://bugs.python.org/issue219221

* The configure script has probably grown a bit crufty with age and
 may not track autoconf's more recent features very well.  It should
 be looked at and possibly cleaned up.

 https://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2004-January/041790.html

* Make Python compliant to the FHS (the Filesystem Hierarchy
 Standard)

 http://bugs.python.org/issue588756

. _`Python bug tracker`: https://github.com/python/cpython/issues
. _`Ideas Discourse category`: https://discuss.python.org/c/ideas/6
. _`obsolete`: https://github.com/python/peps/pull/108#issuecomment-249603204

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