[Python-Dev] Promoting Python 3 [was: PyPy 1.7 (original) (raw)

[Python-Dev] Promoting Python 3 [was: PyPy 1.7 - widening the sweet spot]

Toshio Kuratomi a.badger at gmail.com
Tue Nov 22 18:13:58 CET 2011

On Wed, Nov 23, 2011 at 01:41:46AM +0900, Stephen J. Turnbull wrote:

Barry Warsaw writes:

> Hopefully, we're going to be making a dent in that in the next version of > Ubuntu. This is still a big mess in Gentoo and MacPorts, though. MacPorts hasn't done anything about ceating a transition infrastructure AFAICT. Gentoo has its "eselect python set VERSION" stuff, but it's very dangerous to set to a Python 3 version, as many things go permanently wonky once you do. (So far I've been able to work around problems this creates, but it's not much fun.) I have no experience with this in Debian, Red Hat (and derivatives) or *BSD, but I have to suspect they're no better. (Well, maybe Red Hat has learned from its 1.5.2 experience! :-) For Fedora (and currently, Red Hat is based on Fedora -- a little more about that later, though), we have parallel python2 and python3 stacks. As time goes on we've slowly brought more python-3 compatible modules onto the python3 stack (I believe someone had the goal a year and a half ago to get a complete pylons web development stack running on python3 on Fedora which brought a lot of packages forward).

Unlike Barry's work with Ubuntu, though, we're mostly chiselling around the edges; we're working at the level where there's a module that someone needs to run something (or run some optional features of something) that runs on python3.

I don't have any connections to the distros, so can't really offer to help directly. I think it might be a good idea for users to lobby (politely!) their distros to work on the transition. Where distros aren't working on parallel stacks, there definitely needs to be some transition plan. With my experience with parallel stacks, the best help there is to 1) help upstreams port to py3k (If someone can get PIL's py3k support finished and into a released package, that would free up a few things). 2) open bugs or help with creating python3 packages of modules when the upstream support is there.

Depending on what software Barry's talking about porting to python3, that could be a big incentive as well. Just like with the push in Fedora to have pylons run on python3, I think that having certain applications that run on python3 and therefore need to have stacks of modules that support it is one of the prime ways that distros become motivated to provide python3 packages and support. This is basically the "killer app" idea in a new venue :-)

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