gc exposes the underlying memory management mechanism of Python, the automatic garbage collector. The module includes functions for controlling how the collector operates and to examine the objects known to the system, either pending collection or stuck in reference cycles and unable to be freed. Read more… This post is part of the Python Module of the Week series for Python 3. See PyMOTW.com for more articles from the series.

Although Python is often used as a cross-platform language, it is occasionally necessary to know what sort of system a program is running on. Build tools need that information, but an application might also know that some of the libraries or external commands it uses have different interfaces on different operating systems. For example, a tool to manage the network configuration of an operating system can define a portable representation of network interfaces, aliases, IP addresses, etc.

The selectors module provides a platform-independent abstraction layer on top of the platform-specific I/O monitoring functions in select . Read more… This post is part of the Python Module of the Week series for Python 3. See PyMOTW.com for more articles from the series.

This is the first release of whereto.

smtplib includes the class SMTP , which can be used to communicate with mail servers to send mail. Read more… This post is part of the Python Module of the Week series for Python 3. See PyMOTW.com for more articles from the series.

Lately, I have been revising some of the OpenStack community’s processes to make them more sustainable. As we grew over the last 7 years to have more than 2,000 individual contributors to the current release, some practices that worked when they were implemented have begun causing trouble for us now that our community is changing in different ways. My goal in reviewing those practices is to find ways to eliminate the challenges.

The smtpd module includes classes for building simple mail transport protocol servers. It is the server-side of the protocol used by smtplib . Read more… This post is part of the Python Module of the Week series for Python 3. See PyMOTW.com for more articles from the series.

The statistics module implements many common statistical formulas for efficient calculations using Python’s various numerical types ( int , float , Decimal , and Fraction ). Read more… This post is part of the Python Module of the Week series for Python 3. See PyMOTW.com for more articles from the series.

The socket module exposes the low-level C API for communicating over a network using the BSD socket interface. It includes the socket class, for handling the actual data channel, and also includes functions for network-related tasks such as converting a server’s name to an address and formatting data to be sent across the network. Read more… This post is part of the Python Module of the Week series for Python 3.

The sqlite3 module provides a DB-API 2.0 compliant interface to SQLite, an in-process relational database. SQLite is designed to be embedded in applications, instead of using a separate database server program such as MySQL, PostgreSQL, or Oracle. It is fast, rigorously tested, and flexible, making it suitable for prototyping and production deployment for some applications. Read more… This post is part of the Python Module of the Week series for Python 3.