Python 2.7 for Maverick

[Barry Warsaw]

On Jun 15, 2010, at 06:23 PM, Scott Kitterman wrote:

>What's the rationale for it as default instead of as another supported
>version?

Scott, I know you're aware of the new features in Python 2.7, but for others,
they are outlined here:

http://docs.python.org/dev/whatsnew/2.7.html

Many I think are useful enough to want to adopt Python 2.7.  Tops on my list
would be:

* Many improvements to the unittest module.
* Silencing of DeprecationWarnings that aren't of interest to end users, and
  the addition of $PYTHONWARNINGS to better control this (an outgrowth of our
  work to port Launchpad to Py2.6 and the associated problems).
* runpy support for packages
* argparse module in the stdlib.
* dictionary views
* set literals, dict and set comprehensions
* multiple context managers for with statements
* auto-numbering in str.format()
* better garbage collector performance for long running servers

New features aside, I think defaulting to Python 2.7 now helps us set the path
for Python support in the next LTS.  Regardless of which Python 3 we'll have,
or whether we can even default to Python 3, we know that we'll be supporting
Python 2.7 at the next LTS.  And upstream, Python 2.7 will have a much longer
maintenance schedule because it will (almost certainly) be the last Python 2.

Clearly, if we hit a roadblocking incompatibility for Python 2.7 then we
should support but not default to it for Maverick.  Ultimately we won't know
until we do it because I think just supporting it (and not defaulting to it)
might help developers but won't give us much of a sense of how stable it is
for our Python 2 stack.

-Barry
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