Kitchen, everything but the sink

Author

Toshio Kuratomi

Date

19 March 2011

Version

1.0.x

We’ve all done it. In the process of writing a brand new application we’ve discovered that we need a little bit of code that we’ve invented before. Perhaps it’s something to handle unicode text. Perhaps it’s something to make a bit of python-2.5 code run on python-2.4. Whatever it is, it ends up being a tiny bit of code that seems too small to worry about pushing into its own module so it sits there, a part of your current project, waiting to be cut and pasted into your next project. And the next. And the next. And since that little bittybit of code proved so useful to you, it’s highly likely that it proved useful to someone else as well. Useful enough that they’ve written it and copy and pasted it over and over into each of their new projects.

Well, no longer! Kitchen aims to pull these small snippets of code into a few python modules which you can import and use within your project. No more copy and paste! Now you can let someone else maintain and release these small snippets so that you can get on with your life.

This package forms the core of Kitchen. It contains some useful modules for using newer python standard library modules on older python versions, text manipulation, PEP 386 versioning, and initializing gettext. With this package we’re trying to provide a few useful features that don’t have too many dependencies outside of the python standard library. We’ll be releasing other modules that drop into the kitchen namespace to add other features (possibly with larger deps) as time goes on.

Requirements

We’ve tried to keep the core kitchen module’s requirements lightweight. At the moment kitchen only requires

python

2.4 or later

Warning

Kitchen-1.1.0 was the last release to support python-2.3.x.

Soft Requirements

If found, these libraries will be used to make the implementation of some part of kitchen better in some way. If they are not present, the API that they enable will still exist but may function in a different manner.

chardet

Used in guess_encoding() and guess_encoding_to_xml() to help guess encoding of byte strings being converted. If not present, unknown encodings will be converted as if they were latin1

Other Recommended Libraries

These libraries implement commonly used functionality that everyone seems to invent. Rather than reinvent their wheel, I simply list the things that they do well for now. Perhaps if people can’t find them normally, I’ll add them as requirements in setup.py or link them into kitchen’s namespace. For now, I just mention them here:

bunch

Bunch is a dictionary that you can use attribute lookup as well as bracket notation to access. Setting it apart from most homebrewed implementations is the bunchify() function which will descend nested structures of lists and dicts, transforming the dicts to Bunch’s.

hashlib

Python 2.5 and forward have a hashlib library that provides secure hash functions to python. If you’re developing for python2.4 though, you can install the standalone hashlib library and have access to the same functions.

iterutils

The python documentation for itertools has some examples of other nice iterable functions that can be built from the itertools functions. This third-party module creates those recipes as a module.

ordereddict

Python 2.7 and forward have a OrderedDict that provides a dict whose items are ordered (and indexable) as well as named.

unittest2

Python 2.7 has an updated unittest library with new functions not present in the python standard library for Python 2.6 or less. If you want to use those new functions but need your testing framework to be compatible with older Python the unittest2 library provides the update as an external module.

nose

If you want to use a test discovery tool instead of the unittest framework, nosetests provides a simple to use way to do that.

License

This python module is distributed under the terms of the GNU Lesser General Public License Version 2 or later.

Note

Some parts of this module are licensed under terms less restrictive than the LGPLv2+. If you separate these files from the work as a whole you are allowed to use them under the less restrictive licenses. The following is a list of the files that are known:

Python 2 license

_subprocess.py, test_subprocess.py, defaultdict.py, test_defaultdict.py, _base64.py, and test_base64.py

Contents

• Using kitchen to write good code
  • Overcoming frustration: Correctly using unicode in python2
  • Designing Unicode Aware APIs
• Kitchen API
  • Kitchen.i18n Module
  • Kitchen.text: unicode and utf8 and xml oh my!
  • Kitchen.collections
  • Kitchen.iterutils Module
  • Helpers for versioning software
  • Exceptions
• 1.0.0 Porting Guide
  • python-fedora
  • yum
• Conventions for contributing to kitchen
  • Style
  • Python 2.4 compatibility
  • Unittests
  • Docstrings and documentation
  • Kitchen versioning
  • I18N
  • API updates
  • NEWS file
  • Kitchen subpackages
  • Kitchen addon packages
• Glossary

Indices and tables

• Index

• Module Index

• Search Page

Project Pages

More information about the project can be found on the project webpage

The latest published version of this documentation can be found on the documentation page