[Oneiric-Foundations-Topic]Python Goals

[Scott Kitterman]

On Tuesday, April 26, 2011 05:49:22 PM Matthias Klose wrote:
> 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?

I've only looked (a bit) at Kubuntu.  PyQt4 and PyKDE have upstream support 
for Python3, but it's not packaged yet.  I suspect it's incomplete as not all 
the python modules PyQt4 depends on for Python have been ported to Python3 
(e.g. python-dbus).  There are quite a number of Python packages higher in the 
stack and I have not checked their status:

  usb-creator-kde
  update-manager-kde
  ubiquity-frontend-kde
  system-config-printer-kde
  software-properties-kde
  plasma-scriptengine-python
  kde-config-touchpad
  jockey-kde
  gdebi-kde
  apturl-kde
  apport-kde

You can imagine the similar list for Ubuntu.  If someone was focused on doing 
this sort of work, I think it might be doable in a cycle (porting to Python3 
isn't particularly hard).  Even though I used Kubuntu as an example here, I 
don't think we're in a position to pursue this in Oneiric.  Since I initially 
suggested this, I found out the one full time developer on Kubuntu is going on 
a rotation off the distro team this cycle, so among the community developers 
we've got to pick up the slack and that leaves little to no room for anything 
vaguely optional.

Scott K