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

[Smartboy]

On Tue, Jul 6, 2010 at 5:54 AM, Gergely Imreh <imrehg at 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