[Distutils] Distribute without 2to3

[Lennart Regebro]

On Tue, Jun 21, 2011 at 15:03, Michael Foord <fuzzyman at gmail.com> wrote:
> Really? In my experience dropping 2.4 support allows you to use the with
> statement (just as dropping 2.3 support allows you to use decorators) which
> is a big change.

Sure, but since we support 2.4 now, I don't think the code uses it. In
my experience when making code run on both python 2 and python 3, the
bets path is to run 2to3 on the code and make it run under Python 3,
and then backport one version at a time. And in that case you aren't
using any with-statements or context managers (because the code was
running under 2.4 already before you ran 2to3 on it).

> I've found the 2.5-2.6 changes to be much less dramatic.

Well, in 2.5 you have neither bytes literals, nor "except as", nor
"from __future__ import print_function".
All of these require big changes during a backport. Of course, you
might have done them already for 2.7 even if they were not needed, but
with 2.5 they *are* needed.

//Lennart