Python 3 Support: A Plan of Action

[Stephen J. Turnbull]

Richard Wilbur writes:

 > > Thanks Barry.  Point taken.  I was advocating for v3.5 as it is
 > > purported to greatly improve formatting data into byte streams.

You're talking about PEP 461 <https://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0461/>.

 > > guess we'll see what is available when we get to that point.  (There
 > > may be an implementation we can fall back on in v3.4.)

Unfortunately, the PEP doesn't seem to contain any reference to the
implementation, but it's probably possible to monkey-patch the bytes
type, or perhaps derive a bzrbytes(bytes) type so that v3.4 (and even
earlier, but I think that's pointless; any system except maybe old
Archlinux that has 3.3 or earlier as the latest installed Python
surely has 2.7 installed).

If there's difficulty in doing the work, Ethan Furman (the PEP author)
is still active on the Python lists, and would probably be willing to
provide advice.  ISTR it was actually quite straightforward.