Is it worth back porting PEP 3147 to Python < 3.2?

[Piotr Ożarowski]

[Omer Zak, 2010-04-20]
> My take of the situation:
> Yes, please backport PEP 3147 to at least Python 2.7.
> The rationale: we'll need to support both Python 2.x and Python 3.x for
> several years, and it will be nice if the same library package can be
> made to support both 2.x and 3.x.

you cannot (in most cases) share 2.X and 3.X Python code, so adding it
to 2.7 and not to 2.6 doesn't make sense

> It would also be nice to define a way to specify that a tree of Python
> 2.7 scripts are to be compiled into Python 3.x bytecode, by specifying
> that the compilation process has first to run 2to3
> (http://docs.python.org/py3k/library/2to3.html#to3-reference) on the
> Python scripts and actually compile the 2to3's output.

that has to be done at build time

> On Mon, 2010-04-19 at 17:53 -0400, Barry Warsaw wrote:
> > This will be officially supported in Python starting with 3.2.  It will not
> > however be available in upstream Python 2.7.  The PEP does recognize however
> > that distros may want to back port the feature to get its advantages now.
> > Although I have not yet tried to do so, I think the essential elements of the
> > PEP should be fairly easy to back port to Python 2.6, 2.7 and 3.1.  The
> > question is, should we do this?

I doubt we'll touch 2.X packages in Debian Squeeze and in Squeeze+1
we'll most probably have only 1 Python 2.X version (if any) so I don't
see a point in backporting it in Debian.

If you want to ship two 2.X Python versions in Ubuntu, you could use my
new dh_python for that (I hope to finish it soon), but you'd have to
convert *all* packages to it and lets face it, python2.5 and python2.6
transitions in Ubuntu (at least in universe) were...  well not even
close to Debian's quality and these transitions didn't require that much
work...

(IMHO, /me waits for other opinions)
-- 
Piotr Ożarowski                         Debian GNU/Linux Developer
www.ozarowski.pl          www.griffith.cc           www.debian.org
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