[Python-Dev] Promoting Python 3 [was: PyPy 1.7 - widening the sweet spot]

[Stephen J. Turnbull]

Dirkjan Ochtman writes:

 > I'm sorry for the lack of response in the past. I looked at Gentoo's
 > Bugzilla and didn't find any related bugs you reported or were CC'ed
 > on, can you name some of them?

This isn't about my bugs; I've been able to work through them
satisfactorily.  It's about what I perceive as a need for simultaneous
improvement in Python 3 support across several distros, covering
enough users to establish momentum.

I don't think Python 3 needs to (or even can) replace Python 2 as the
system python in the near future.  But the "python" that is visible to
users (at least on single-user systems) should be choosable by the
user.  eselect (on Gentoo) and port select (on MacPorts) *appear* to
provide this, but it doesn't work very well.

 > > Is lack of Python 3-readiness considered a bug by Gentoo?
 > 
 > Definitely. Again, we are trying to hard to make things better, but
 > there's a lot to do and going through version bumps sometimes wins out
 > over addressing the hard problems.

Well, as I see it the two hard problems are (1) the stack-per-python-
minor-version solution is ugly and unattractive to users, and (2) the
"select python" utility needs to be safe.  This probably means that
python-using ebuilds need to complain if the Python they find isn't a
Python 2 version by default.