On Tue, Jul 6, 2010 at 5:54 AM, Gergely Imreh <imrehg@gmail.com> wrote:
From that page: "Popular modules that don't yet support Python 3 include Twisted (for networking and a bunch of other stuff), gevent (like Twisted but different), Django and Pylons (for building websites), PyGTK and PySide (for making GUIs), py2exe (for packaging your application for Windows users), PIL (for processing images), numpy (for number crunching)..."
Thus I would mind a rebuild less, than losing my daily numpy/scipy/PyGTK...
Actually, I know for a fact that PyGTK has a patch which has been worked on for quite a while which supports Python 3, and I'm sure at least some of the others have patches in their development branches for them, too. Those which don't have any patches (or any other means available to them) would be labeled as a python2 package instead of just python, from what I understand, and thus they wouldn't be forcing anything. It probably wouldn't be too hard to modify packages that need it to use python2 instead of just python (in many cases, I'd expect it'd just require patching the crunch bang in the beginning of the code and/or a recompile specifying the python2 directory as the one to use). I'm not a developer, though, just another user, so if you're intrested in it then please consult them on this.
Arch is not in a position to force these packages to update to Python 3, and such I don't think it's a good idea to bump the default version up to 3. On the other hand, there are plenty of people who are experienced in code fixes, so maybe there would be some who would join the porting effort for those packages that they use on a regular basis. This could accelerate the transition.
Like said above, they wouldn't be forcing anyone to do anything, and in fact they could be seen as helping python programs know where fixes are needed to make the jump from Python 2 to Python 3. This, along with the fact that Python 3 probably wouldn't come to the main repos for a while (that 500+ package rebuild would probably take a while to get through, even with the whole team just focusing on that and neglecting their jobs), would mean you'd not be losing anything very fast. Smartboy