[Python-Dev] Bring new features to older python versions (original) (raw)

Michael Foord fuzzyman at voidspace.org.uk
Tue Oct 11 14:49:43 CEST 2011

On 10/10/2011 21:21, Giampaolo Rodolà wrote:

Thanks everybody for your feedback. I created a gcode project here: http://code.google.com/p/pycompat/

2011/10/8 Antoine Pitrou<solipsis at pitrou.net>: There's also some stuff there that is coded in C, or that will rely on some functionality of the core interpreter that is not easily emulated on previous versions. But I suppose you'll find that out by yourself. Yep, I'm still not sure what to do about this. I guess I'll just ignore that stuff in all those cases where rewriting it in python is too much effort. Toshio Kuratomi<a.badger at gmail.com> wrote: I have a need to support a small amount of code as far back as python-2.3 I don't suppose you're interested in that as well? ;-) I'm still not sure; 2.3 version is way too old (it doesn't even have decorators). It might make sense only in case the lib gets widely used, which I doubt. Personally, at some point I deliberately dropped support for 2.3 from all of my code/lib, mainly because I couldn't use decorators. so I don't have a real need to do this.

Yes, rewriting code from Python 2.7 to support Python 2.3 (pre-decorators) is a real nuisance. In my projects I'm currently supporting Python 2.4+. I'll probably drop support for Python 2.4 soon which will allow for the use of the with statement.

2011/10/9 Éric Araujo<merwok at netwok.org>: The issues I foresee with your lib are more technical: First, it looks like a big bag of backported modules, classes and functions without defined criterion for inclusion (“cool new stuff”?). I'd say the criterion for inclusion is putting in everything which can be (re)written in python 2.4, such as any, all, collections.defaultdict and property setters/deleters (2.6). Pretty much all the stuff written in C would be left out, maybe with the exception of functools module which is important (for me at least), in which case I might try to rewrite it in pure Python. I'm sharing your same doubts though. Maybe this isn't worth the effort in the first place. I'll try to write some more code and see whether this is a good candidate for a "public module". If not I'll just get back to use it as an internal "private" module. 2011/10/9 Éric Araujo<merwok at netwok.org>: keep on lumping new things until Python 3.4? 3.8? Won’t that become unmanageable (boring/huge/hard)? I don't think it makes sense to go over than 3.2 version. Folks which are forced to use python 2.4 are already avoing to use 2.6 and 2.7 features, let alone 3.X only features. Plus, python 3.2 was already the latest 3.X version which still had something in common with 2.7.

However, if you can include Python 3.2+ features then projects that also support Python 3 can still use new features without having to worry about compatibility (it solves the same problem).

All the best,

Michael Foord

--- Giampaolo http://code.google.com/p/pyftpdlib/ http://code.google.com/p/psutil/

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