[Distutils] [Distribute] Python 3 porting effort - plans proposal for 0.7/0.8

[Tarek Ziadé]

On Thu, Jul 23, 2009 at 4:37 PM, Lennart Regebro<regebro at gmail.com> wrote:
> 2009/7/23 Tarek Ziadé <ziade.tarek at gmail.com>:
>> I think you don't see my point : making a pure Python 3 version, without
>> any backward compatibility issues / bootstraping , fight against setuptools
>> distribution. Then backporting it in 0.7
>>
>> But 0.8 would not be 2.x compatible.
>
> That would mean we would have two branches of the same code that need
> to be kept compatible.

That's exactly how Python 2.X / 3.x are developed. And we expect 0.6
then 0.7 to become
maintenance branches at some point.

> I don't see why that would be a better idea
> than having one branch and one version.
>

Like I said the python 3 branch will be pure python 3 code so we won't
have to worry
about keeping it compatible with both python 2.x and python 3

That makes the code simpler and cleaner. The maintenance effort between
the two branches is not hard as long as there's a maintainer that makes sure
every commit in the 0.8 branch is backported, like in Python-dev.
I am willing to do this maintenance work.

And since Python 3 is a setuptools-free land, we won't have to worry
in the 0.8 version
about a possible setuptools cohabitation.

And people that are using setuptools under 2.x will have less pain to
switch to different
package names and drop their "import setuptools" infavor of something else,
for their 3.x versions.

In fact, the sooner such a version is out, the better it could be for
Py3 adoption.

I don't see any benefit in having a mixed code for 2.x/3.x, but troubles ahead;

Tarek
-- 
Tarek Ziadé | http://ziade.org