[Python-ideas] docs.python.org

[Nick Coghlan]

On Sat, Oct 27, 2012 at 2:46 PM, Yury Selivanov <yselivanov.ml at gmail.com> wrote:
> I think that the message should be clear, and after 3 years it's time to say
> that python 3 is always the preferred way.  After all, people are not dumb,
> if they use python 2 they can go and download it, and they certainly can find
> docs for it as well.

The message is clear, but some people just don't like the current
message: Python 2 is still the recommended default version for
production systems and applications.

- most hosting services (including Platform-as-a-Service providers
with a Python option) only offer Python 2
- Fedora, RHEL and derivatives still require Python 2 for all their
system utilities (Ubuntu at least has migrated their core system
tools, but I don't know about Debian upstream)
- Django does not yet have a released version that supports Python 3
(and even once 1.5 final is out the door, the Python 3 support is
technically classed as experimental until 1.6)
- graphics support in Python 3 is still a little sketchy in some
regards, but clearly improving (pygame and various GUI libraries like
pyside already work, pyglet has an alpha version, there's no
PIL/Pillow release, but there are working forks [1])

I don't think the ecosystem is to the point where it makes sense to
flip the switch just yet, but I do think it would be reasonable to
define the ecosystem state where we *will* flip the switch. The two
key missing pieces for me are:
- a Django release with non-experimental Python 3 support (i.e. likely
to happen with Django 1.6)
- an official release of PIL (or Pillow) that supports Python 3

(Why do I include those, and not Twisted? Because if you're a capable
enough developer to cope with Twisted, you're going to be able to cope
with the move from 3.3 back to 2.7)

Cheers,
Nick.

[1] http://mail.python.org/pipermail/image-sig/2012-October/007080.html

-- 
Nick Coghlan   |   ncoghlan at gmail.com   |   Brisbane, Australia