Today's quote of the day: "It's great when you open up a repository and there's data in it". The Chandler sprint is picking up a little steam today. The folks working on backup restore have learned enough API to do a walk of the items in the repository, and take a first crack at an XML format for the backed up data. Brian Dorsey decided that he was interested enough in WebDAV to try and figure out how to build a remote repository that uses WebDAV as a transport (we already have Jabber and SOAP based transports). People seem to be able to get work done, but there's a lot of terminology and concepts that people are struggling with.

I've also started to meet a few folks in the Python community. This morning I got into a discussion with few of the core python hackers (our sprint is in the same room as theirs) on future of security in python. They confirmed that the rexec and bastion modules are considered broken. It seems that some people are interested in a capability based approach, while others are a bit more wary and would like a more traditional ACL based approach. One of the big objections raised against capabilities was that they would require a much more intensive rewrite of the libraries to accommodate a capability based style when compared to ACLs. It would really be great to have a security roadmap/plan for Python, but it seems that someone(s) need to stand up and make a firm proposal.

There was also a discussion of the restricted Python implemented by Zope. Zach Burke stopped by afterwards and pointed me at the actual code.

In the afternoon, the core Python hackers discussed the upcoming Python 2.4 release. There are still some decisions that need to be made before there's a real release plan. It was interesting to watch how a release is handled. Coming from Apache, it's a little foreign (read different, not bad) to see how decisions depend on Guido's opinion. This wasn' t a surprise, it was just interesting to see the process in action.

Other discussion that I had today were related to Perforce versus Subversion, and an interesting discussion with Michael McLay that covered ground ranging from funding open source to how to promote Python adoption.