[Oneiric-Foundations-Topic]Python Goals

[Matthias Klose]

On 04/26/2011 08:50 PM, Barry Warsaw wrote:
> Apologies for the long delayed response.
>
> On Apr 01, 2011, at 01:11 PM, Scott Kitterman wrote:
>
>> On Friday, April 01, 2011 12:58:37 PM Barry Warsaw wrote:
>>> Agreed.  Can you elaborate on what "experimental support for Python3 as the
>>> Python that is shipped on the various Ubuntu ISOs" means to you?  Does that
>>> mean no Python 2.7 on the ISO?  Also, by "experimental" do you mean having
>>> a process for creating alternative CDs that have only Python 3.2 but not
>>> on the standard daily CDs?
>
>> There is a lot of Python code in the Ubuntu insfrastructure.  I'm not sure
>> exactly what I meant by that, but here's an example:
>>
>> Ubiquity is written in Python.  It's a reasonably complex program that is non-
>> trivial to maintain and improve.  It's also mission critical for Ubuntu.  I
>> would be really suprised if it was fully ported with no regressions in one
>> cycle.  In this case, I think "experimental support" would be a python3 branch
>> that ~works, but may not be fully tested/have issues/or not be at feature
>> parity so we wouldn't want to switch to it in the oneiric cycle.
>>
>> The goal would be to have it be mature enough during oneiric that in the "P"
>> cycle we could switch to it early and have it land ~smoothly for the LTS.
>>
>> I know there are others.
>>
>> My impression is that most upstreams for core desktop packages support
>> Python3.  Mostly what we lack is packaging changes to support it.  My
>> expectation is that most of the challenge around a Python3 desktop in "P" will
>> be around more peripheral modules/extensions and custom Ubuntu code.
>>
>> That shouldn't preclude shipping some Python3 stuff in oneiric if it's ready
>> and we've got room on the relevant image.
>>
>> Does that help?
>
> It does, thanks.  I wonder, with work going on in Launchpad to support
> derivatives, can we pervert that to create a Python 3 Ubuntu derivative that
> could be used for this experiment?  It may not be fully functional, but I
> think it would be a great test and status tracker for how well our Python 3
> efforts are going.

which packages are affected, and what work is needed to get these packages even 
built?