[Python-Dev] [RELEASED] Python 2.7 alpha 2

[Barry Warsaw]

On Jan 10, 2010, at 6:07 PM, Martin v. Löwis wrote:

> As for decisions: I don't think there was an official BDFL pronouncent,
> but I recall Guido posting a message close to that, proposing that 2.7
> will be a release that will see bug fix releases for an indefinite
> period of time (where indefinite != infinite). This was shortly after
> him proposing that perhaps we shouldn't make a 2.7 release at all, and
> stop at 2.6.

IMO, the focus for Python 2.7 (and beyond) must be on helping people transition to Python 3.  That should be the reason why a 2.7 is released and, what should dictate whether a 2.8 is necessary.

Maybe everything people need (except manpower and round tuits) is already there.  I was pleasantly surprised to find that Distribute supports automatically running 2to3 at install time for Python packages.  This allowed me to "port" a recent (admittedly small) package to Python 3 by making it "python2.6 -3" clean and adding a couple of attributes to my setup.py[1].  I don't know how widely that feature's known, but I think it's *huge*, and exactly what we need to be doing.  The more we can make it easy for people to port their Python 2 code to Python 3, and to support that with one code base, the quicker we'll get to a predominantly Python 3 world.

So the question we should be asking is: what's missing from Python 2.7 to help with this transition?  If we can't get it into 2.7, then why, and would pushing it back to 2.8 help at all?

-Barry

[1] modulo a bug in Distribute that caused doctest in separate files to not be used when running  under Python 3.