Bazaar on IronPython

By Michael Foord -
The IronPython team are extremely interested in IronPython's compatibility with CPython. One easy way of finding incompatibilities (bugs) is running large Python applications on IronPython. Jeff Hardy has done a lot of work on this front by running Django and setuptools with IronPython, and now the Bazaar (Distributed Version Control System written in Python) team are joining in the fun.
In short, see the attached patch for getting bazaar to run on IronPython. It only passes a subset of the tests, but can do some of the basics like creating a new repo, adding and diffing, and committing the changes. This is not intended for merging, many of the changes are addressing interpreter bugs and differences rather than problems with the code. However there are a number of issues raised that might be of interest to bazaar developers.

Having nibbled round the edges of the bzrlib.osutils module, I wanted a task that would serve as an excuse to look over the platform related code as a whole. I'd downloaded IronPython some months back and not had cause to play with it, and seeing that Adrian Wilkins investigated this a year ago and wrote up some helpful tips, it seemed achievable.

My basic strategy was to get selftest working then deal with categories of test failures. I mostly used IronPython 2.0.0 though I tried the first 2.6 beta towards the end, which threw up a few extra issues, but may have been a better choice to start as it's less compiling-the-world slow on every invocation. There's still work to be done to make bazaar generally usable under IronPython, and fair bit of low hanging fruit (for instance I left warnings about terminal encodings untouched as a useful progress indicator).
This threw up a bunch of issues in IronPython. As usual Dino (and team) worked their magic and posted the following reply to the IronPython mailing list a matter of days later:
With this morning's source push all of these should be fixed now except for the zlib and re.RE_Pattern issues.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Extending Abobe Flash Player and AIR with Python and Ruby

By Michael Foord -
An intriguing blog entry about an Adobe experimental project. It is a C/C++ cross- compiler for the flash player and AIR. This means that you can (will be able to?) cross-compile the Python / Ruby/ lots of other language runtimes and then run them in Flash. The blog entry contrasts this approach to the DLR which requires the re-implementation of dynamic languages - hence IronPython and IronRuby. The project is already beyond proof-of concept, they even have Quake III cross-compiled and running in Flash. Extending Adobe Flash Player and AIR with C/C++ Cross-Compiler Quake 3 has already been ported to managed code , but this is even more impressive. Whether the Python interpreter can be cross-compiled to run on top of another runtime (with completely different basic types), without changing the language semantics at all, has yet to be proved - but it is a very interesting project. (It also means that Python/Ruby will possibly be enabled only by additional optional downloads - but don'
Read more

Should Python Projects Support IronPython and Jython?

By Michael Foord -
The maintainers of the Spring Framework for Python ( Spring Python ) wonder how much of a priority it is to have compatibility with platforms other than CPython. In other words, should they support IronPython and Jython - and if so what should they do about their C extension dependencies? This question sparks a good discussion and is relevant to many other Python projects and applications: Need for supporting IronPython, Jython? " One of the topics on my mind recently, as we consider refactoring the core container, is how we ensure that when we introduce internal dependencies, such as possibly the Amara libraries for XML processing, what secondary constraints we might be introducing. " " For example, Amara represents a very pythonic and therefore simple to read and use approach to developing XML processing, such as our very own XML application configuration parsers. So from that perspective, things are very attractive. But then you ask the question, "can I run this
Read more

Further Adventures of the Debugger

By Michael Foord -
Harry Pierson (Microsoft IronPython PM) has been experimenting with writing an IronPython debugger ( ipydbg ) on top of the .NET MDbg APIs. When we last left him , he had implemented Just My Code (JMC) support allowing you to step into IronPython code. Since then he has made a lot of progress including a colourful REPL (interactive console) and solving some difficult problems around getting to real values behind boxed IronPython variables (needed for showing local variables). He has blogged extensively on what he has been up to (more recent posts last): Showing Source Code Colorful Console IronPython ConsoleColorMgr (the colorful console code pulled out into a separate IronPython module) A Little Hack...err...Cleanup Getting Local Variables Displaying Values Command Routing Getting Arguments REPL Console A lot of functionality is now present. In the command routing entry Harry outlines the seven commands supported by the debugger so far: Continue, Quit, Show Stack Trace, Show Locals,
Read more