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

[Allan McRae]

On 06/07/10 22:54, Gergely Imreh wrote:
> On 6 July 2010 20:09, Ng Oon-Ee<ngoonee at gmail.com>  wrote:
>> On Tue, 2010-07-06 at 10:51 +0200, Lukáš Jirkovský wrote:
>>> On 6 July 2010 10:19, Isaac Dupree<ml at isaac.cedarswampstudios.org>  wrote:
>>>> On 07/06/10 01:57, Lukáš Jirkovský wrote:
>>>>>
>>>>> Hello Allan,
>>>>> I know that I'm just a regular user but I'd like to express my opinion
>>>>> too. I think the transition should be done when most modules and
>>>>> applications support Python 3. I'd not be surprised if the transition
>>>>> of majority of modules would take several years. By that time there
>>>>> may be a way how to do a dual rename.
>>>>
>>>> Hi Lukas,
>>>> Can you present a technical reason against doing the renaming now? Because
>>>> as far as I can see, Allan has worked out the kinks and it will actually not
>>>> harm you as a regular user at all...
>>>>
>>>> (unless you write personal scripts in python that you want to work with
>>>> #!something on multiple distros? (then you probably want to run them in
>>>> python version 2) .. I'm not sure I can think of an easy way to do that;
>>>> maybe for each distro you use you could put a symlink in
>>>> /usr/local/bin/python2 for example.)
>>>>
>>>> -Isaac
>>>>
>>>
>>> Hi Isaac,
>>> I don't write Python scripts but yeah, I think this is a real problem.
>>> The other problem is that there are not many users of python 3 out
>>> there.
>>>
>>> In a more subjective way I think whenever something is set as default
>>> it should be the one which has most users (in both terms of people and
>>> software).
>>>
>>> Lukas
>>
>> As another user (who doesn't write Python), I'd state that 'majority
>> usage' is a pretty poor guideline for users of a Linux distro, and a
>> relatively small one at that.
>>
>> I'm all for the option which reduces workload on the packagers. Of
>> course if things break big-time then it may be a problem, but that's
>> what [testing] is for, and those of us using it should know what to do
>> if/when breakage occurs.
>>
>>
>
>
> Some more background info for those who are not that familiar why the
> Python 2 vs. 3 is such a big problem (there seem to plenty of people,
> and sorry for the ones who already know this inside out):
> http://wiki.python.org/moin/Python2orPython3
>
>> 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...

Do you seriously think would be removing those from the repos?  That 
would be insane...

numpy/scipy/pygtk/etc will all be in the repos and working.  The only 
thing you will have to do is use "#!/usr/bin/env python2.7" (or just 
python2) at the start of your script.

Allan