[Python-Dev] PEP 414 - Unicode Literals for Python 3

[Barry Warsaw]

On Feb 27, 2012, at 12:34 PM, Giampaolo Rodolà wrote:

>Il 25 febbraio 2012 21:23, Armin Ronacher
>If the main point of this proposal is avoiding an explicit 2to3 run on
>account of 2to3 being too slow then I'm -1.

2to3's speed isn't the only problem with the tool, although it's a big one.
It also doesn't always work, and it makes packaging libraries dependent on it
more difficult.

As for the "working" part, I forget the details, but let's say you have a test
suite in your package.  If you run `python setup.py test` in a Python 2 world,
then `python3 setup.py test` may fail to build properly.  IIRC this was due to
some confusion that 2to3 had.

I've no doubt that these things can be fixed, but why?  I'd much rather see
the effort put into allowing us to write Python 3 code natively, with some
accommodations for Python 2 from a single code base for the last couple of
years that that will still be necessary <wink>.

Cheers,
-Barry