[Python-Dev] Spreading the Python 3 religion (original) (raw)

Barry Warsaw barry at python.org
Thu Mar 1 17:24:19 CET 2012


On Mar 01, 2012, at 04:42 PM, Antoine Pitrou wrote:

Well, to be honest, "making good progress" currently means "bored and not progressing at all" :-) But that's not due to the strategy I adopted, only to the sheer amount of small changes needed, and lack of immediate motivation to continue this work.

For any porting strategy, the best thing to do is to get as many changes into upstream as possible that prepares the way for Python 3 support. For example, when I did the dbus-python port, upstream (rightly so) rejected my big all-together-now patch.

Instead, we took a number of smaller steps, many of which were incorporated before the Python 3 support landed. These included:

You could add to that things like print functions (although IIRC dbus-python had few if any of these), etc. So really, it was the same strategy as any porting process, but the key was breaking these up into reviewable chunks that could be applied while still keeping the code base Python 2 only.

I really do think that to the extent that you can do that kind of thing, you may end up with essentially Python 3 support without even realizing it. :)

Cheers, -Barry



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