[Python-Dev] Python 2.x and 3.x use survey, 2014 edition (original) (raw)

Chris McDonough chrism at plope.com
Wed Dec 17 01:45:07 CET 2014

On 12/16/2014 03:09 AM, Barry Warsaw wrote:

On Dec 16, 2014, at 02:15 PM, Skip Montanaro wrote:

While he doesn't explicitly say so, I got the distinct impression reading his recent blog post that he supports one source, not forked sources. I've ported a fair bit of code, both pure-Python and C extensions, both libraries and applications. For successful library ports to Python 3 that need to remain Python 2 compatible, I would almost always recommend a single source, common dialect, no-2to3 approach. There may be exceptions, but this strategy has proven effective over and over. I generally find I don't need six but it does provide some nice conveniences that can be helpful. With something like tox running your test suite, it doesn't even have to be painful to maintain.

I'll agree; with tox and some automated CI system like travis or jenkins or whatever, once you've done the port, it's only a minor nuisance to maintain a straddled 2/3 codebase. Programming in only the subset still isn't much fun, but maintenance is slightly easier than I expected it to be. "Drive by" contributions become slightly harder to accept because they often break 3 compatibility, and contributors are often unable or unwilling to install all the required versions that are tested by tox.

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