[Python-Dev] The Breaking of distutils and PyPI for Python 3000?

[glyph at divmod.com]

On 08:34 pm, fumanchu at aminus.org wrote:
>Martin v. Löwis wrote:

>>You seem to be implying that some projects may release separate
>>source distributions. I cannot imagine why somebody would want
>>to do that.
>
>That's odd. I can't imagine why anybody would *not* want to do that.

Python 2 is going to be around for a long time.  No user is going to 
want to pay the migration cost all at once.  Users of library packages 
will loudly demand this continued support.

Long-term maintenance of a complete fork of your software in 2 very very 
subtly different languages, and backporting every single change 
effectively doubles the amount of work, in the best case.  I certainly 
can't afford to do that with Twisted.  Inserting a few hacks here and 
there (and annotating your code with some extra metadata, in the py3 
case for 2to3) is something we _already_ have to do to maintain 
compatibility for multiple Python versions in one piece of software.

That is why Guido has personally explained, in at least 2 keynote 
speeches, several blog posts, and several mailing list messages, that 
maintaining a single source release and translating it is *the* way that 
you manage the Python 3 transition for anything but a small project, or 
an application that's a true leaf in the dependency graph.  (The "burn 
your bridges" solution is not available to anyone who has more than one 
other person using their code as code and not simply a UI.)

I am happy to have found a reason to emphatically agree with you, Martin 
:-).