[Python-Dev] Core projects for Summer of Code

[Maciej Fijalkowski]

>
> While working on the core is admirable, I think gsoc would provide an
> opportunity to port important Python libraries to 3.x. It's important
> to remember that doing ports helps the core immensely by uncovering
> 2to3 and py3k bugs.
>

Hello.

It's a very noble task to have important python libraries ported to
python 3.x. I've played almost whole last year with porting important
python libraries to work on different python interpreters (running the
same version of python). They differ in tiny details, only a bit. And
guess what, it was not only hard, but also very tedious. And now
consider student, who looks for joy and is facing python library (say
medium, couple tens of k lines of code). With help of 2to3 is getting
something that almost works on top of python 3. Except for few small
details. This probably means couple weeks spend on debugging obscure
failures that end up depending on different string representation of
exception or something like that. Assuming he knows python well enough
to understand not only major differences (which are handled  by 2to3
anyway), but also all minor ones. And those tiny which makes you
wonder why unicode subclasses and string subclasses are not exactly
behaving how they're defined in a spec.

Suppose student is smart and likes debugging and it's all working. Now
the question is, who will maintain the resulting library? Will
original team of say twisted maintain it or will it be up to student?
Will it just rot in a corner? Who'll maintain buildbots for that?

I think we need to ask first guys who spend their live maintaining
libraries instead of just proposing "let's make some poor student port
it to py3k", but I might be just wrong, I don't know.

Cheers,
fijal