Python3 Breakage Fixed

[Scott Kitterman]

On Friday, July 13, 2012 10:17:53 AM Barry Warsaw wrote:
> On Jul 13, 2012, at 09:55 AM, Scott Kitterman wrote:
> >Yesterday was not a good one for the  Python 3 stack.  I sync'ed in some
> >improvements from Debian earlier in the week and it fairly quickly became
> >clear that we're using Python 3 a lot in Quantal.  The last real bug from
> >this, lp:1024016 was fixed about 10 hours ago and it looks like new
> >dupes/reports have ~stopped.
> >
> >The reason this hit us in Ubuntu is that Debian has not had the same push
> >for Python 3 use in Wheezy (and uses Python much less than Ubuntu in any
> >case). The root cause from a development perspective was a combination of
> >buggy code and buggy tests that didn't reveal the errors.  Having it hit
> >during the week when the primary dh_python3 author is at Debconf didn't
> >help either.
> Thanks so much for fixing this Scott.  I'm glad that our aggressiveness is
> helping Wheezy too.  :)
> 
> While the package itself could perhaps use some additional unittests, what
> do you think could have helped us in Ubuntu to catch this earlier?

The package has a number of tests already, but that doesn't mean more wouldn't 
be better.  In this case, tests/t4 should have caught the problem, but it 
suffered from the same fundamental issue dh_python3 did (incomplete update of 
code originally done for dh_python2).  The actual problem wasn't a lack of 
tests, but a buggy test.  More is always better.  IIRC you have access to the 
relevant VCS in Debian....

See bzr.debian.org/bzr/pkg-python/python3-defaults-debian/ rev 159 for 
details.

Scott K