[aur-general] Python-3.x transition with python-2.7 update

[Evangelos Foutras]

On Mon, Jul 5, 2010 at 4:11 PM, Allan McRae <allan at archlinux.org> wrote:
> Hi all,
>
> Here comes a rebuild so large that our TODO list had trouble handling it!
>  Hopefully all packages are now in the rebuild list....  At a total of 518
> packages long, it puts the combined libpng/libjpeg rebuild to shame.
>
> Python-2.7 has been releases and will be the last 2.x official release of
> python.  So it is time to switch to python-3.x as our /usr/bin/python and
> python-2.7 as our /usr/bin/python2.  See
> http://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/DeveloperWiki:Python_Todo_List for all
> the details about how to achieve this.
>
> It is actually not that hard.  I had a system converted when python-3.1 was
> released as a test run.  The main key is to build packages in a clean chroot
> so that they detect and point their files to /usr/bin/python2.  Some
> packages are stupid and require a sed at the end of packaging to fix that.
>
> Because this rebuild is crazy stupid, I would like to plan when it is going
> to occur.  We will need to clear out [testing] as much as possible over the
> coming week or two (what is happening with perl...).  Also, a new KDE is a
> the beginning of next month so I would not want to conflict with that.  Any
> other major rebuilds on the way?  Should we do this in a separate repo?
>
> Allan

What will be the benefits of switching to Python 3.x? The newly
released Python 2.7 contains many features [1] from the 3.x branch,
which makes the transition at this point less appealing. Please don't
take my question the wrong way, but I read in the wiki where you say:

"During the rebuild, care needs to be taken to make sure all rebuilt
packages are really using the python2 binary."

Is everything going to be rebuilt against Python 2? If yes, isn't that
the current situation?

You obviously have given this more thought that I have, but it seems
to me that a more preferable option would be to just update to Python
2.7.

Regards.

----
[1] http://python.org/download/releases/2.7/