[Python-Dev] RELEASED Python 3.0 final

[glyph at divmod.com]

On 01:47 am, guido at python.org wrote:
>>In spite of Python being a programming language, there is a difference
>>between 'casual user of the language' and 'library developer'; 3.0 is
>>certainly a must for all actual library developers, and I'm sure most 
>>of
>>them know about 3.0 by now. We're talking about first impressions for 
>>people
>>without that knowledge.
>
>Well if most library developers already know 3.0 by now, I would hope
>they aren't going to sit on their hands, and solve the issues at hand!

The best thing for 3.0 adoption would be a 3.0 "welcoming committee".  A 
group of hackers wandering from one popular open source library to 
another, writing patches for 3.x compatibility issues.  There must be 
lots of people who care about 3.x adoption, and this is probably the 
most effective way they can reach that goal.

Each time I am going to fix a 3.0 compatibility issue, I have a choice: 
I can either make Twisted itself better (add features, fix bugs), or I 
can keep Twisted exactly the same but do lots of work so it will work on 
3.0.  It seems pretty clear to me that, to the extent that I have time 
for Twisted, fixing bugs in the HTTP implementation would be a better 
deal than puzzling through a megabyte of diffs generated by 2to3, trying 
to understand where it went wrong, and how.

This doesn't mean I'm "sitting on my hands".  It just means I have 
better things to be doing with my hands.  (To be precise, 1054 better 
things to do, re: Twisted.  Add in the Divmod projects and it's more 
like 3000.)

Of course the distant threat of an unmaintained 2.x series is enough to 
motivate me to push a *little* in this direction, but it doesn't make me 
happy about it.

I think this is exactly what the marketing effort around 3.0 needs to be 
doing: making a positive case for library and application authors to 
spend time to update to 3.x.  This is a lot of work, and many (I might 
even say most) of us need a lot of cajoling.  Free patches are a good 
incentive :).