[Python-Dev] PEP 4000 to explicitly declare we won't be doing a Py3k style compatibility break again?

["Martin v. Löwis"]

Am 18.08.14 08:45, schrieb Nick Coghlan:
> It's certainly the one that has caused the most churn in CPython and
> the standard library - the ripples still haven't entirely settled on
> that front :)

For people porting their libraries and applications, the challenge is
often even bigger: they need to learn a new programming concept. For
many developers, it is a novel idea that character strings are not
just bytes. A similar split is in the number types (integers vs.
floats), but most developers have learned the distinction when they
learned programming. That a text file is not a file that contains text
(but bytes interpreted as text) is surprising. In addition, you also
have to learn a lot of facts (what is the ASCII encoding, what is
the iso-8859-1 encoding, what is UTF-8 (and how does it differ from
Unicode)).

When you have all that understood, you *then* run into the design
choices to be made for your software.

> 
> I think Guido's right that there's also a "death of a thousand cuts"
> aspect for large existing code bases, though, especially those that
> are lacking comprehensive test suites.

I think the second big challenge is "my dependencies are not ported
to Python 3". There is little you can do about it, short of porting
the dependencies yourself (fortunately, Python and most of its libraries
are free software).

Regards,
Martin