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

[Thomas Dziedzic]

On Mon, Jul 5, 2010 at 8:33 AM, Evangelos Foutras <foutrelis at gmail.com> wrote:
> 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/
>

Hmm, the more I think about this, the more this solution sounds
appealing, since it wouldn't require that much work.
We could possibly move to python 3.x at a later time when one of the
2.7.x fixes comes out and when more packages have a chance to
transition to python 3.
I really don't know the reasons behind this move, but this is just my
2¢ for now :)
Cheers!