[Python-3000] [python-committers] [Python-Dev] Proposed Python 3.0 schedule

[Mark Hammond]

[when 2 mailing lists are not enough... :-]

> I'm seeing that people are just starting to download and play with 3.0.
> I expect that we'll start getting more feedback on conversion issues

+1 from this direction too.  pywin32 has recently started looking seriously
at py3k, and while things are in fairly good shape for us who are already
"on the bandwagon", cleaning up a few rough edges would help people's first
impressions - and as they say, you only get one chance at a good first
impression...

More specifically, I think 2to3 is shaping up well.  pywin32 is taking the
approach of "port where possible, but keep in py2x syntax and convert at
'setup.py' time" and this is working out fairly well (in fact, with just a
couple of helpers in pywintypes, I think we can support python 2.3 upwards).
I believe that many projects may well take a similar approach as it allows
them to defer a full commitment to py3k, so doing all we can to support this
might help with that first impression.  My experience is that this could
best be achieved by addressing the following issues before release:
 
* Almost all open 2to3 issues that aren't truly edge cases should be
resolved - if 2to3 doesn't work for people, they may be forced to (even
temporarily) "fork" their project, which will cause concern.  I'll note that
good recent progress is being made here, but its still worth mentioning...

* Better support for 2to3 in distutils (specifically, the support in
build_py is stale, plus 'build_scripts' and 'install_data' should convert
.py files to py3k syntax.)  An 'example' project that uses py2k syntax and
"just works" on py3k using this strategy might be useful here.

* A standard 'helper script' that allows people to use py3k to execute a
py2x syntax script by auto-converting the code.  I've a 10ish-line script
that uses lib2to3 plus exec() to achieve that result, but a helper in 2to3
for this would be nice.  For a concrete use-case, we want to keep our
distutils script in py2x syntax, but execute it via py3k.  Its very possible
this already exists and I've just missed it...

Either way, I'm fairly confident a pywin32 build for py3k will be available
in the next month or 2 (but as a result, I'm not really in a position to
help with the above for that period...)

Hopefully-helpfully,

Mark