Python 3

[Stephen J. Turnbull]

John Arbash Meinel writes:

 > Anyway, I see your point. From my pov, there is always the
 > chicken-and-the-egg stuff. I would probably look more closely at making
 > sure we work with python-2.7 today, and once that is out, we'd probably
 > be want to be close to ready for python3 around 1-year after python-2.7
 > is released (it will be supported for a long time, but after about a
 > year I would guess missing features would start to be noticeable.)

I would not bet on that.  Currently Python 3 (the language) is in a
long-term feature freeze (for 3.2 at least; possible 3.3 as well), as
it is in catch-up mode for the stdlib even today (email needs a
complete rewrite because of the peculiar nature of email as a
bytes-oriented protocol which is nominally ASCII text but in fact is
only slightly less random than an MS-Word core dump, and there are
several other modules which need a fair amount of work).  And large
3rd party frameworks like numpy and Twisted are not there yet (real
soon now, really, for numpy; Real Soon Now (uh, right, yup, not!) for
Twisted.

Python 3 is very attractive for new development because it's cleaner
and because it has a usable approach to Unicode.  (All my own stuff
got converted a long time ago, and I've never missed Python 2 at all.)
Once people get their minds wrapped around it, I think the mail and
web-oriented stdlib modules are going to see quantum improvements.  If
you have other interests in Python 3, sure, you can get started on
porting Bazaar to it now, I think, which wasn't true at all for Python
3.0, and was only marginally true for 3.1.  But for general
programming and ongoing development of applications with a lot of
history (in which I would include Bazaar), there really is no hurry
AFAICS.