[Python-Dev] 2.7 Release? 2.7 == last of the 2.x line?

[Andrew McNabb]

On Tue, Nov 03, 2009 at 12:28:47PM -0500, Arc Riley wrote:
> 
> The main thing holding back the community are lazy and/or obstinate package
> maintainers.  If they spent half the time they've put into complaining about
> Py3 into actually working to upgrade their code they'd be done now.

The main reason the package maintainers are so "lazy and/or obstinate"
is that Python 2 is much more available than Python 3.  For example,
work is being completed on a python3 RPM, but it will first appear in
Fedora 13, not Fedora 12.  RHEL is still using Python 2.4 and won't even
get Python 2.6 until RHEL 6 comes out.  I don't think it's worth
worrying about packages being upgraded to Python 3 when many or most
users still don't have access to Python 3.

In my opinion, the best place for current efforts is on infrastructure:

1) Python 3 packages for all Linux distributions (I've recently been
involved with bringing Python 3 to Fedora)

2) WSGI/mod_python, etc.: according to
http://wsgi.org/wsgi/Amendments_1.0 and various blog posts, the WSGI
standard isn't defined for Python 3 yet, and the modwsgi page at
http://code.google.com/p/modwsgi/ does not yet list a Python 3 release.

3) Numpy/scipy: as others have mentioned, numpy is essential for
scientific work, and apparently the project needs help to add support
for Python 3

Before basic infrastructure is available for Python 3, it's absurd to
expect package maintainers to flock to it.

-- 
Andrew McNabb
http://www.mcnabbs.org/andrew/
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