[Python-Dev] API deprecations in Python 3, from a Python 2 perspective

[Lennart Regebro]

On Sat, Mar 19, 2011 at 03:42, Nick Coghlan <ncoghlan at gmail.com> wrote:
> 5. The parallel evolution of the 2.x and 3.x line meant that the first
> version of 2.x with the relevant warning was released only ~7 months
> or so before the version of 3.2 where the API was removed

An additional issue that makes it particularly problematic for me is
that this is a part of moving a whole framework, the Zope Component
Architecture And Friends (aka the Bicycle toolkit) that contains a lot
of hard to port projects like zope.testing and zc.buildout. This means
that it's so far take three years of porting (starting with efforts to
port Setuptools in 2008) and isn't done yet. It's extremely
frustrating that in the middle of this porting effort the target
changes, so things I *thought* was done and ported, are now suddenly
not done anymore. It becomes a sisyphean task to port to Python 3, and
I don't fancy myself ending up in such a boring part of hell. :-) If I
had instead ignored Python 3 completely until this year, then I this
wouldn't have been a problem. As a result it feels like early porters
like me just got our fingers whacked.

But it all comes down to what Guido mentioned in his fie-side chat (at
least how I understood him): The pace of change for Python needs to
slow down a bit, at least until the migration to Python 3 both for
Python implementations and general use has been completed.

//Lennart