root/tags/release2_2/announcements.txt

ftputil 2.2 is now available from
http://ftputil.sschwarzer.net/download .

Changes since version 2.1
-------------------------

- Results of stat calls (also indirect calls, i. e. listdir,
  isdir/isfile/islink, exists, getmtime etc.) are now cached and
  reused. This results in remarkable speedups for many use cases.
  Thanks to Evan Prodromou for his permission to add his lrucache
  module under ftputil's license.

- The current directory is also locally cached, resulting in further
  speedups.

- It's now possible to write and plug in custom parsers for directory
  formats which ftputil doesn't support natively.

- File-like objects generated via ``FTPHost.file`` now support the
  iterator protocol (for line in some_file: ...).

- The documentation has been updated accordingly. Read it under
  http://ftputil.sschwarzer.net/trac/wiki/Documentation .

Possible incompatibilities:

- This release requires at least Python 2.3. (Previous releases
  worked with Python versions from 2.1 up.)

- The method ``FTPHost.set_directory_format`` has been removed,
  since the directory format (Unix or MS) is set automatically. (The
  new method ``set_parser`` is a different animal since it takes
  a parser object to parse "foreign" formats, not a string.)

What is ftputil?
----------------

ftputil is a high-level FTP client library for the Python programming
language. ftputil implements a virtual file system for accessing FTP
servers, that is, it can generate file-like objects for remote files.
The library supports many functions similar to those in the os,
os.path and shutil modules. ftputil has convenience functions for
conditional uploads and downloads, and handles FTP clients and servers
in different timezones.

License
-------

ftputil 2.2 is Open Source software, released under the revised BSD
license (see http://www.opensource.org/licenses/bsd-license.php ).

Stefan

----------------------------------------------------------------------
The second beta version of ftputil 2.2 is available. You can download
it from http://ftputil.sschwarzer.net/download .

With respect to the first beta release, it's now possible to write
and plug in custom parsers for FTP directory formats that ftputil
doesn't know natively. The documentation has been updated accordingly.

The documentation for this release is online at
http://ftputil.sschwarzer.net/trac/wiki/Documentation#Documentationforftputil2.2b2 ,
so you can read about the extensions in more detail.

Please download and test the release. Do you miss something which
should be in this release? Are there any bugs?

Stefan

----------------------------------------------------------------------
The first beta version of ftputil 2.2 is available. You can download
it from http://ftputil.sschwarzer.net/download .

With respect to the previous alpha release, the cache now uses the
lrucache module by Evan Prodromou which is bundled with the ftputil
distribution. (Evan also gave his permission to include the module
under ftputil's modified BSD license instead of the Academic License.)
The documentation for the cache and its control have been added to
ftputil.txt / ftputil.html .

File objects generated with FTPHost.file now support the iterator
protocol (for line in some_file: ...).

Please download and test the release. Do you miss something which
should be in this release? Are there any bugs?

Stefan

----------------------------------------------------------------------
Welcome to the first alpha release of ftputil 2.2, ftputil 2.2a1.
Please download it from http://ftputil.sschwarzer.net/download .

This version adds caching of stat results to ftputil. This also
affects indirect calls via FTPHost.path, e. g. methods isfile,
exists, getmtime, getsize. The test script at
http://ftputil.sschwarzer.net/trac/browser/tags/release2_2a1/sandbox/list_dir_test.py
runs about 20 times as fast as before adding caching! :-)

As the "alpha" part implies, this release is not production-ready,
it's even kind of experimental: The caching works but there's no
cache entry expiration yet. (I plan to implement an LRU expiration
strategy or something similar.) Apart from that, the release is
tested as any production release. I suggest using the --prefix
option for installing alpha releases.

That said, it would be helpful if you tested this release and
report your findings. When testing the code, please make sure
that your code uses the ftputil version you intend (alpha vs.
production version), e. g. by setting the PYTHONPATH environment
variable. I'm very interested in the speedups - and any problems
you encounter.

Stefan

----------------------------------------------------------------------
ftputil 2.1.1 is now available from
http://ftputil.sschwarzer.net/download .

This release fixes a bug which happened when a client opened
a large file on the server as a file-like object and read
only a part of it. For details, see
http://ftputil.sschwarzer.net/trac/ticket/17 .

Stefan

----------------------------------------------------------------------
Changes since version 2.0
-------------------------

- Added new methods to the FTPHost class, namely makedirs, walk,
  rmtree.

- The FTP server directory format ("Unix" vs. "Windows") is now set
  automatically (thanks to Andrew Ittner for testing it).

- Border cases like inaccessible login directories and whitespace in
  directory names, are now handled more gracefully (based on input
  from Valeriy Pogrebitskiy, Tommy Sundstr�nd H. Y. Chu).

- The documentation was updated.

- A Russian translation of the documentation (currently slightly
  behind) was contributed by Anton Stepanov. It's also on the website
  at http://ftputil.sschwarzer.net/trac/wiki/RussianDocumentation .

- New website, http://ftputil.sschwarzer.net/ with wiki, issue tracker
  and Subversion repository (thanks to Trac!)

  Please enter not only bugs but also enhancement request into
  the issue tracker!

Possible incompatibilities:

- The exception hierarchy was changed slightly, which might break
  client code. See http://ftputil.sschwarzer.net/trac/changeset/489
  for the change details and the possibly necessary code changes.

- FTPHost.rmdir no longer removes non-empty directories. Use the new
  method FTPHost.rmtree for this.

What is ftputil?
----------------

ftputil is a high-level FTP client library for the Python programming
language. ftputil implements a virtual file system for accessing FTP
servers, that is, it can generate file-like objects for remote files.
The library supports many functions similar to those in the os,
os.path and shutil modules. ftputil has convenience functions for
conditional uploads and downloads, and handles FTP clients and servers
in different timezones.

License
-------

ftputil 2.1 is Open Source software, released under the revised BSD
license (see http://www.opensource.org/licenses/bsd-license.php ).

Stefan

----------------------------------------------------------------------
ftputil 2.0.3 is now available at
http://www.sschwarzer.net/python/python_software.html#ftputil .

This release fixes (for most cases) some problems when logging into an
FTP server with an inaccessible login directory, i. e. `getcwd()`
returns "/some/login/dir" but `chdir("/some/login/dir")` fails.

Thanks go to Valeriy Pogrebitskiy for investigating and reporting
these problems.

Stefan

----------------------------------------------------------------------
Here's ftputil 2.0 !

ftputil is a high-level alternative to Python's ftplib module. With
ftputil, you can access directories and files on remote FTP servers
almost as if they were in your local file system. This includes using
file-like objects representing remote files.

For future releases see
http://www.sschwarzer.net/python/python_software.html
or subscribe to the mailing list at
http://codespeak.net/mailman/listinfo/ftputil

What's new?
-----------

From version 1.1 to 2.0, the following has changed:

- ftputil has been re-organized and is now a Python package (the
  import statement is still the same)

- installation via Python distutils

- stat, upload_if_newer, download_if_newer etc. work correctly if the
  server is in another time zone than the client running ftputil (with
  help from Andrew Ittner); see section "Time zone correction" in the
  documentation

- it's possible to set the directory listing format "manually" (though
  in most cases it's recognized automatically); see section "Stat'ing
  files and directories"

- added a workaround regarding whitespace in directory names (thanks
  to Tommy Sundstr�nd H. Y. Chu)

- extended documentation and converted it to HTML format (now
  generated from reStructured Text)

- several bugfixes

- there's now a mailing list at http://codespeak.net/mailman/listinfo/ftputil
  (thanks to Holger Krekel)

Documentation
-------------

The documentation for ftputil can be found in the file ftputil.txt
(reStructured Text format) or ftputil.html (recommended, generated
from ftputil.txt).

License
-------

ftputil is Open Source Software. It is distributed under a BSD-style
license (see the top of ftputil.py).

Stefan

----------------------------------------------------------------------
ftputil 1.1 is released. You can find it at
http://www.ndh.net/home/sschwarzer/python/python_software.html .

ftputil provides a higher-level interface for FTP sessions than the
ftplib module. FTP servers can be accessed via an interface similar to
os and os.path. Remote files are accessible as file-like objects.

New since version 1.0:

- ftputil now runs under Python 2.1+ (not only 2.2+).
- documentation
- conditional upload/download (depending on local and remote file
  timestamps)
- FTPHost.stat follows links
- a session factory other than the default, ftplib.FTP, can be given
  in the FTPHost constructor; this allows to use classes derived from
  ftplib.FTP (like ftpslib.FTP_TLS from the M2Crypto package)
- several bugfixes (mostly regarding byte count in text mode
  transfers)
- unit test

Stefan
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Hello Pythoneers :)

I would like to announce ftputil.py, a module which provides a
more friendly interface for FTP sessions than the ftplib module.

The FTPHost objects generated from it allow many operations similar
to those of os and os.path. Examples:

  # download some files from the login directory
  import ftputil
  host = ftputil.FTPHost('ftp.domain.com', 'user', 'secret')
  names = host.listdir(host.curdir)
  for name in names:
      if host.path.isreg(name):
          host.download(name, name, 'b')  # remote, local, binary mode

  # make a new directory and copy a remote file into it
  host.mkdir('newdir')
  source = host.file('index.html', 'r')  # file-like object
  target = host.file('newdir/index.html', 'w')  # file-like object
  host.copyfileobj(source, target)  # mimics shutil.copyfileobj
  source.close()
  target.close()

Even host.path.walk works. :-) But slow. ;-)

ftputil.py can be downloaded from
http://www.ndh.net/home/sschwarzer/download/ftputil.py

I would like to get your suggestions and comments. :-)

Stefan


P.S.: Thanks to Pedro Rodriguez for his helpful answer to my question
in comp.lang.python :-)
----------------------------------------------------------------------