On Sat, Oct 27, 2012 at 3:44 PM, Yury Selivanov
Start with docs switching to py3k by default. That shouldn't be harmful (and I hope that my docs theme patch will be accepted soon).
Actually, there are at least a few very real harms that come from switching the docs over: 1. Many third party Python 2 tutorials include links to our docs. We can't magically reach out to those sites and update their links, so they will end up linking to Python 3 resources from Python 2 ones 2. It breaks links on sites like Stack Overflow and in mailing list archives and our own bug tracker, which currently link to the main docs to explain Python 2 behaviour 3. it completely breaks direct hyperlinks to names that no longer exist in Python 3 (even the ones that exist under new names). I'm actually wondering if docs.python.org should be updated *now* with a rewrite rule that redirects to a more explicit docs.python.org/2.x/ URL. At the moment, there is no easy way to get hold of a stable URL for the Python 2 docs, and nothing we can put in any advance announcement of a migration to say something like: "docs.python.org will switch to displaying the Python 3 documentation by default in June 2013. Please update any direct links that are intended to refer specifically to the Python 2 documentation by including a leading '/2.x/' in the path component of the URL. For example, 'http://docs.python.org/library/os' would become 'http://docs.python.org/2.x/library/os'. Between now and the migration in June 2013, affected links will be automatically redirected to the new stable Python 2.x URLs". So that's my concrete proposal: 1. We pick a date (June next year sounds about right) 2. We pick a stable URL prefix for the Python 2 docs (I vote "/2.x/") 3. We start redirecting affected pages immediately 4. We add a notice like the one above to the home page of the 2.7 docs, announce it on the PSF blog, announce it far and wide Cheers, Nick. -- Nick Coghlan | ncoghlan@gmail.com | Brisbane, Australia