Python-based user agent
Jonathan S. Shapiro (shap@eros-os.org)
Wed, 26 Apr 2000 11:18:17 -0400
The python advocates among you will be pleased to know that I've rebuilt the
user agent in Python. I have done this for several reasons:
- Much of the user agent's job is list management and attribute management.
Python runtime is good at this.
- As proof of concept. I have claimed that the user agent should be
separable from the server. If so, python should be usable to create a user
agent.
- For prototyping speed.
I'm still not convinced it will stay in python, partly because of the
scripting integration, but that's a debate for later.
Switching to python has left me with two challenges. Perhaps some of the
python wizards on the list can help on these:
- I don't have a good random number generator. The standard python library
implementation doesn't have a decent entropy source. What I'ld really like
is a python-based interface to Peter Gutman's random bit generator. There is
a copy of his bit generator in the GPG cipher/ directory. Can someone point
me to a python interface for this file? If none exists, would someone
volunteer to do the necessary conversion(s) on the C code to provide a
python interface?
- Can somebody point me to a good digital signature implementation that is
easily used from python? If there is a GPG wrapper, this would suffice, and
might answer request (1) as well.
shap