Now bringing you everything but the kitchen sink!

Those of you who hang out in the same IRC channels as me may have heard me mention the python module I’ve been working on with some other Fedora python programmers. For those who haven’t, the 0.2.1a1 release seems like the perfect time for me to invade the blogosphere!

Kitchen is a module that aims to collect small, useful pieces of code into one python package for install on your machine. It’s a kind of a library of miscellaneous, small python functions. Why is that something special? Well, what those of us working on kitchen were realizing is that small pieces of code are a strange beast. They’re so small that it feels like the overhead of creating a python package just for them will result in a setup.py that’s larger than the module. On the other hand, the code is so useful that you end up reimplementing it in every project that you work on. And of course, once you start cutting and pasting and reimplementing between projects you have the problem of keeping those copies in sync; making sure that bugs that were fixed in the copy in one project are fixed in all of them.

What’s needed is to have one larger umbrella package that pulls all of those functions together. Then you can fix problems in a single place and also only have the overhead of writing setup.py files and making releases once for all of those functions. This is exactly what kitchen is.

So what do you get with the 0.2.1-alpha1 release? You get a bunch of code that originated in yum, python-fedora, a few snippets from the ActiveState Python Recipe Collection, and some backports from python-2.7 for earlier python. You get API documentation and a few tutorials on using kitchen to ease your programming burden.

What can you do with these shiny new tools? Let’s take a really brief tour of the modules included in the release:

i18n

Functions and objects in here will help you setup gettext for internationalizing your application’s messages

text

Have you ever been stumped by the difference between unicode and str types in python? how many times have you written your own to_unicode and to_bytes functions? Well, you can stop cutting and pasting that because this kitchen module has both of those functions builtin for you! As a bonus, we also throw in a

• getwriter() function that won’t throw exceptions
• functions to make strings safe for use in xml
• functions for helping you display formatted unicode text on a monospace display

collections

Currently this only provides a dictionary implementation that keeps strict separation between str and unicode keys. ie: ‘a’ and u’a’ are different keys.

iterutils

Contains two functions at the moment:

• isiterable() will accurately detect if an object is an iterable.
• iterate takes a value and iterates over it. If the value is a scalar, it becomes an iterator that returns a single value. If it’s already an iterable, we just iterate that.

versioning

Currently has one function for assembling a PEP-386 compliant version string from a set of tuples (format of which is also in PEP-386)

Compatibility modules for things added in Python-2.4, Python-2.5, and Python-2.7.

The compatibility modules implement functionality that was merged into python at a later version than you might have. So if you need defaultdict that appeared in python-2.5, it’s here. The nice thing about these modules is that we take care to import from the python standard library if it’s available and only use the copied compat library if it’s not available.

As with any open source project, this is an evolving code base. We’re doing our best to have a long deprecation cycle for functions that we remove and clearly document how to replace the functionality with other functions in kitchen. If you have a favourite useful piece of code that you’d like to see merged, feel free to send us a message on the mailing list or open up a ticket in our trac instance.