Breaking python2.4 compatibility for bzr-2.4

[Gordon Tyler]

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On 4/20/2011 8:31 PM, Martin (gzlist) wrote:
> On 20/04/2011, John Arbash Meinel <john at arbash-meinel.com> wrote:
>>
>> This has been discussed a bit in the past, and Martin and I have chatted
>> about it a bit recently on IRC. I've personally reached my threshold,
>> and would like to break compatibility with python 2.4 for our next
>> release (bzr 2.4).
>
> I'd much prefer if Bazaar 2.4 supported Python 2.4 still.

What are your reasons?

>> 2) try/finally in generators. This helps a lot to make cleanup in a
>> generator much clearer.
>>
>> 3) try/except/finally, also nice to have. Not critical, but definitely
>> nice to have.
>>
>> 4) with: statements. Along the same lines of "make your cleanup
>> clearer".
>
> I'm not convinced any of these are really compelling. The sugar
> doesn't hurt, but 'with' is used to obfuscate as much as it is to
> clarify, and sloppy cleanup is a problem with code, not the language.

The point is that the sugar makes it easier to see that you're doing
cleanup properly. Having to write reams of boilerplate is a recipe for
bugs.

>> 5) If we go all the way to python2.6 compatibility we can start looking
>> at doing things to support Python 3.
>> (This is my recommendation, since RHEL6 has python2.6, and I don't
>> think anything else is strictly blocked for python2.5)
>
> Is there anyone who actually wants to work on this though? I note the
> last release of testtools was broken on Python 3 again and wasn't
> noticed. There's a lot to do in the codebase as it stands over bytes
> vs. unicode before getting on to worrying about whether print need
> parentheses.

But if we stay compatible with 2.4 then we cannot make any headway
towards compatibility with 3.

Ciao,
Gordon

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