Python: Three Ways to Solve One Keyword Argument Problem
Serhiy Storchaka opened three competing implementations for required keyword-only arguments in the C argument parser, while a cluster of smaller fixes tightened up marshaling, pickling, and documentation edge cases across the standard library.
Duration: PT2M34S
Episode overview
This episode is a short developer briefing from Python.
It explains recent repository work in plain language.
- Show: Python
- Published: 2026-08-07T13:07:39Z
- Audio duration: PT2M34S
Transcript excerpt
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Good morning. It's August 7th, twenty twenty-six, and this is your Python briefing.
The standout pattern today: one problem, three proposed solutions, all from the same author, opened within minutes of each other. Serhiy Storchaka put up pull requests 155331, 155330, and 155329 to solve a long-standing gap in "PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords" — right now you can't express a function with required…
That same keyword-only argument area got a related documentation fix merged today — PR 155301 and its backports to 3.13, 3.14, and 3.15 — correcting years-old, incorrect documentation that claimed keyword-only arguments must always be optional. They don't have to be, and now the docs say so.
Second theme: small correctness fixes to serialization and error paths. Tonghuaroot filed two related frozendict fixes — PR 155316 fixes a marshal round-trip bug where shared frozendict references failed to load, and PR 155325 fixes pickling so it works across all protocols, not just two through five. Same author…
A few reliability fixes rounded things out: PR 152354 adds a resource warning when a ZipFile is closed with unwritten data, PR 155296 prevents a crash when de-instrumenting malformed code…
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