It's not even that easy -- libraries can't apply patches for Python 3 compatibility as they usually break Python 2 compatibility. Potentially libraries could apply patches that make a codebase 2to3 ready, but from what I've seen that's more black magic than straight forward updating, as such patches have to trick 2to3 producing the output that is desired.
I wouldn't qualify it in that way. It may be necessary occasionally to trick 2to3, but that's really a bug in 2to3 which you should report, so that trickery is then a work-around for a bug - something that you may have to do with other API, as well. The "black magic" is really more in the parts that 2to3 doesn't touch at all (because they are inherently not syntactic); these are the problem areas Guido refers to. The "black magic" then is to make the same code work unmodified for both 2.x and 3.x.
The only workable workflow I've seen people propose for maintaining a single codebase with compatibility across both 2 and 3 is to use such tricks, with aliases to suppress some 2to3 updates when they are inappropriate
I think you misunderstand. All this is necessary, but *not* to suppress 2to3 updates. More typically, it is necessary because 2to3 leaves the code unmodified either way.
Also, running 2to3 on installation is kind of annoying, as you get source that isn't itself the canonical source, so to fix bugs you have to look at the installed source and trace it back to the bug in the original source.
That's an issue indeed, but one that I would hope that can be fixed by improved traceback printing. It would be good if such traceback printing could make it into 2.7. Regards, Martin