Forking baazar to add Python 3.x support

[Ben Finney]

Richard Wilbur <richard.wilbur at gmail.com> writes:

> So the best option I can see is to start preparing for the transition
> to Python 3 by moving the code to embrace the newest aspects of 2.7
> and compatibility libraries.

I think this is a good conclusion.

>     Presently bzr 2.6+ requires Python 2.6 which includes back-ported
> features from Python 3.0.  In order to take advantage of back-ported
> features from 3.1 it seems we would want to be using a recent release
> of 2.7[1] and the consensus for 3.x seems to be 3.3+.  In other words,
> the revised module would require Python 2.7 or 3.3+ in order to run.
> Will that cause anybody problems?

This is a good question to ask. But I think it will need to be answered
by a representative sample of the Bazaar user base, most of whom are
*not* reading this forum.

As I understand it (I don't have any hard evidence for this), Bazaar's
user base has many members in private projects within corporations.
Those private projects have no public face, and a survey of the internet
won't find them.

It would be a big win to get feedback from those users on the future
development of Bazaar. How will we find and engage them?

> If we were to factor out some of the functionality to be standalone
> […] These components would then need to be tracked as separate
> dependencies with individual version requirements and releases. What
> does that buy us? I suppose what comes immediately to mind is that
> anyone creating an application that depends on one or more of these
> modules would no longer be required to import the whole bzrlib.

Another important benefit of breaking those components out is that they
could be improved separately, and migration to Python 3 would likely be
more tractable (easier to test, easier for developers to understand) for
each since the separate projects would be smaller.

-- 
 \       “People come up to me and say, ‘Emo, do people really come up |
  `\                                            to you?’” —Emo Philips |
_o__)                                                                  |
Ben Finney