[Python-Dev] readd u'' literal support in 3.3? (original) (raw)

Vinay Sajip vinay_sajip at yahoo.co.uk
Thu Dec 8 16:27:57 CET 2011

Matt Joiner <anacrolix gmail.com> writes:

Nobody is using 3 yet ;) Sure, I use it for some personal projects, and other people pretend to support it. Not really. The worst of the pain in porting to Python 3000 has yet to even begin!

The classic chicken-and-egg problem, right? Someone's got to make a start. If you aim for porting with a single codebase and are not too hung up about "practicality beats purity" hacks like e = sys.exc_info()[1], then I think decent progress can be made with little risk, as long as the project has good test coverage (and if it doesn't ... well, that's risky even if you stay on 2.x ...).

Django porting took a week of elapsed time (i.e. < 1 person-week of effort) to go from thousands of test failures under 3.x and sqlite to zero test failures. Django is a pretty big project, so I can't imagine "ordinary mortal" projects are going to be too bad (as long as not implemented pathologically). Of course, the Django port has some way to go, but still ... pip and virtualenv are relatively mature single code base ports, too. As additional examples - I've done Babel, Whoosh, Elixir, WTForms and others the same way.

Of course, I understand that YMMV.

Regards,

Vinay Sajip

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