Python 3

[Martin Pool]

On 1 July 2010 23:59, John Arbash Meinel <john at arbash-meinel.com> wrote:
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> Martin Pool wrote:
>> On 1 July 2010 07:49, Max Kanat-Alexander <mkanat at bugzilla.org> wrote:
>>> On 06/30/2010 02:28 PM, John Arbash Meinel wrote:
>>>> Though if we decided we could drop 2.4 support (and not 2.5) it might
>>>> work for us.
>>>        Dropping 2.4 support makes the baby sysadmin messiah cry.
>>
>> This is really not on the cards for the foreseeable future.  There are
>> clear benefits to supporting 2.4, and only minor benefits at present
>> to supporting 3 now.  I think supporting 3 would be good but I
>> certainly wouldn't give up 2.4 to get there.
>>
>> Perhaps we can send patches to six to make it 2.4 compatible.
>>
>
> Certainly I don't see us doing it for any of bzr 2.0, 2.1 or 2.2. I was
> thinking more along the lines of 2.3 (or 3.0 :). As you say, supporting
> 3.x is lower on the list right now than supporting python 2.4. However,
> I think this will change at some point in the future, and we should be
> aware of that, and of tech that might help us transition.

+1

I'm delighted to take patches that make things work more cleanly with
-3 warnings or through 2to3 or directly on 3, as long as they don't
break 2.4 or make the code excessively ugly.  Conversely if someone
feels they want to develop a parallel branch that does work on 3 that
might be an interesting experiment.

Every time the topic of dropping 2.4 support comes up several people
post that they still want it supported.  I run into machines running
multi-year-old OS releases fairly often so I sympathize.

The byte vs unicode transition may be hard enough that we want to
start chewing on it.

We're going to branch off 2.2 and bump the trunk to 2.3 in about a
month so it's possible that we could say the 2.2 series will be the
last one supported on 2.4.  I feel like the right time to do that is
when somebody says "I really want to do X and it's just not feasible
in 2.4" - whether that is using 2to3 or six or something else.  We've
had some "it would be nice" cases like context managers but nothing
really compelling yet.

-- 
Martin