[Python-Dev] Spreading the Python 3 religion (was Re: PEP 414 - Unicode Literals for Python 3)

[Brett Cannon]

On Tue, Feb 28, 2012 at 09:53, Barry Warsaw <barry at python.org> wrote:

> On Feb 28, 2012, at 08:41 AM, R. David Murray wrote:
>
> >Hmm.  It seems to me that this argument implies that PEP 414 is just
> >as likely to *slow down* adoption of Python3 as it is to speed it up,
> >since if this issue is as big a barrier as indicated, many potential
> >porters may choose to wait until OS vendors are supporting 3.3 widely
> >before starting their ports.  We are clearly expecting that the reality
> >is that the impact will be at worse neutral, and hopefully positive.
>
> If PEP 414 helps some projects migrate to Python 3, great.
>
> But I really hope we as a community don't perpetuate the myth that you
> cannot
> port to Python 3 without this, and I hope that we spend as much effort on
> educating other Python developers on how to port to Python 3 *right now*
> supporting Python 2.6, 2.7, and 3.2.  That's the message we should be
> spreading and we should be helping developers understand exactly how to do
> this effectively, among the many great options that exist today.  Only in
> the
> most extreme cases or the most inertially challenged projects should we say
> "wait for Python 3.3".
>

Well, when the code is committed I will update the porting HOWTO and push
the __future__ imports first since they cover more versions of Python (i.e.
Python 3.2). But I will mention the options that skip the __future__
imports for those that choose not to use them (or have already done the
work of using the u prefix in their code). Plus that doc probably will need
an update of caveats that seem to bit everyone (e.g. the str(bytes) thing
which I didn't know about) when trying to do source-compatible versions.
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