[Python-Dev] PEP 414 - Unicode Literals for Python 3 (original) (raw)

Barry Warsaw barry at python.org
Tue Feb 28 16:04:34 CET 2012

On Feb 28, 2012, at 10:49 PM, Nick Coghlan wrote:

On Tue, Feb 28, 2012 at 10:19 PM, Antoine Pitrou <solipsis at pitrou.net> wrote:

Again that's wrong. If you cleverly use 2to3 to port between branches, patches only have to be written against the 2.x version. Apparently you know how to do that, but I don't. If I, as a CPython core developer, don't know how to do that, how is it reasonable to expect J. Random Hacker to become a Python 3 porting export?

They don't need to, but we do, and it's incumbent on us to educate our users. I strongly believe that now is the time to be porting to Python 3. It's critical to the long-term health of Python. It's up to us to learn the strategies for accomplishing this, spread the message that it is not only possible, but usually easy (and yes even, from my own experience, fun!). Oh and here's how in three easy steps, 1, 2, 3.

I've blogged about my own porting experiences extensively. My strategies may not work for everyone, but they will work for a great many projects. If they work for yours, spread the word. If they don't, figure out something better, write about it, and spread the word.

We really need to stop saying that porting to Python 3 is hard, or should be delayed. It's not in the vast majority of cases. Yes, there are warts, and we should continue to improve Python 3 so it gets easier, but by no means is it impossible for most code to be working very nicely on Python 3 today.

-Barry

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