[Python-Dev] email package status in 3.X

[Nick Coghlan]

On Thu, Jun 17, 2010 at 6:48 AM,  <lutz at rmi.net> wrote:
> I trust that people realize this is a show-stopper for broader
> Python 3.X adoption.  Why 3.0 was rolled out anyhow is beyond
> me; it seems that it would have been better if Python developers
> had gotten their own code to work with 3.X, before expecting the
> world at large to do so.
>
> FWIW, after rewriting Programming Python for 3.1, 3.x still feels
> a lot like a beta to me, almost 2 years after its release.  How
> did this happen?  Maybe nobody is using 3.X enough to care, but
> I have a feeling that issues like this are part of the reason why.
>
> No offense to people who obviously put in an incredible amount of
> work on 3.X.  As someone who remembers 0.X, though, it's hard not
> to find the current situation a bit disappointing.

Agreed, but the binary/text distinction in 2.x (or rather, the lack
thereof) makes the unicode handling situation so hopelessly confused
that there is a lot of 2.x code (including in the standard library)
that silently mixes the two, often without really testing the
consequences (as clearly happened here).

3.x was rolled out anyway because the vast majority of it works.
Obviously people affected by the problems specific to the email
package and any other binary vs text parsing problems that are still
lingering are out of luck at the moment, but leaving 3.x sitting on a
shelf indefinitely would hardly have inspired anyone to clean it up.
My personal perspective is that a lot of that code was likely already
broken in hard to detect ways when dealing with mixed encodings -
releasing 3.x just made the associated errors significantly easier to
detect.

If we end up being able to add your email client code to the standard
library's unit test suite, that should help the situation immensely.

Regards,
Nick.

-- 
Nick Coghlan   |   ncoghlan at gmail.com   |   Brisbane, Australia