PyCon is over!

This was my 4th PyCON in USA (Chicago)  and it was actually the best one - perhaps it was one of the best conference - at least from organizational side. Some of the news I picked up over the last days:

• Google is working on a CPython version based on LLVM which should provide a performance boost by a factor of 5. Right now the overall performance increase seems to be about 30%. Will have an eye on using their work together with Zope. Zope already compiles smoothly however raises a weird cPickle error during the startup phase.
• PyPI mirroring: PEP 381 is the further standard for creating the official PyPI mirror infrastructure. Tarek Ziade and Martin von Loewis will be working on this project. I had some discussion with Martin about reusing parts of the existing z3c.pypimirror code for the new infrastructure.
• At the Python language summit was decided to rethink and reimplement parts of the setuptools in order to move core functionality into the Python distribution.
• Python 3.1/Python 2.7: it is unlikely at further Python 2.X version will see any major new feature except for features introduce with further Python 3.X version being backported to Python 2.7 in order to perform a smooth transition path from Python 2.x to Python 3.x. The idea of a 3to2 converter came up (basic idea: write your new code for Python 3 and port it back to Python 2).
• Zope visibility  at PyCON: Martijn Faasen and Lenart Regrebro gave great lightning talks about the current state of Zope, several talks were focused on Plone and Jim Fulton tried to attract people to zc.buildout which is obviously widel unknown within the Python world.
• I had only one day for sprinting and I worked on stuff for the new Zope 2 microsite. Bajiu made great progress on www.buildout.org and other peoples are working on a concept and story for the relaunch of www.zope.org...lot's of interesting things going on...hard to follow all of them..
• and: Python has a Pony :-)