While there is no public announcement from the PSF yet, I sent an email to the python-dev mailing list at least to announce the issue but also try to discuss how to mitigate/prevent it.
Honestly, I am impressed that the information gone so quick! The National Security Authority of Slovakia contacted the PSRT 10 days ago. All packages were removed 1h10 after we got their email. We were discussing how to communicate about this issue, while they published an advisory. A few hours after the advisory was published, I saw the information on IRC, Twitter, LWN, etc. I didn't expect that the advisory would be published so quickly. FYI last week there was also a CPython sprint attended by more than 20 Python core developers. We were busy on discussing Python enhancements.
No, a PEP was required because there was a lot of discussion on the API, and also non trivial choices on the implementation (pure C? pure Python? C+Python?). To have an idea of the amount of discussion, read the "Rejected ideas" of the PEP:
"As an ex Perl guy (well I still use it sometimes), I find append and extend an endless source of confusion in Python. Especially as strings do the opposite of what I expect, and get treated as character arrays with extend (or was it append)."
list.extend(data) works like "for item in data: list.append(item)"
strings (str) do not behave differently than a list or a set. Try .append() on a list or a set, you get the same behaviour.
Maybe your confusion comes from the fact that strings are immutable in Python, and a list is not a string.
You may like bytearray() in Python 2 (bytearray.append raises an error if you pass a string longer than 1 character), but there is not mutable type for Unicode strings.
"Debug tool for Python injecting memory allocation faults to simulate a low memory system to test how your application handles MemoryError exceptions."
I started the development of tracemalloc at Wyplay, but I rewrote all the code for the version included in Python 3.4: complelty different API, you get different data, new implementation, etc. The old code:
https://github.com/wyplay/pytracemalloc/
The PEP 445 (malloc API) also allows to plug hooks on memory allocators at runtime, instead of having to recompile Python for that.
https://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2017-September/...
Honestly, I am impressed that the information gone so quick! The National Security Authority of Slovakia contacted the PSRT 10 days ago. All packages were removed 1h10 after we got their email. We were discussing how to communicate about this issue, while they published an advisory. A few hours after the advisory was published, I saw the information on IRC, Twitter, LWN, etc. I didn't expect that the advisory would be published so quickly. FYI last week there was also a CPython sprint attended by more than 20 Python core developers. We were busy on discussing Python enhancements.