The real problem with Python 3 - no business case for conversion (was "I strongly dislike Python 3")

[David Cournapeau]

On Tue, Jul 6, 2010 at 4:30 AM, D'Arcy J.M. Cain <darcy at druid.net> wrote:
> On Mon, 05 Jul 2010 14:42:13 -0400
> Terry Reedy <tjreedy at udel.edu> wrote:
>> Good start. Now what is blocking those four?
>> Lack of developer interest/time/ability?
>> or something else that they need?
>
> How about a basic how-to document?  I maintain PyGreSQL and would like
> to move it to 3.x right now but I don't even know what the issues are.

One thing that would be very useful is how to maintain something that
works on 2.x and 3.x, but not limiting yourself to 2.6. Giving up
versions below 2.6 is out of the question for most projects with a
significant userbase IMHO. As such, the idea of running the python 3
warnings is not so useful IMHO - unless it could be made to work
better for python 2.x < 2.6, but I am not sure the idea even makes
sense.

>
> Or is there no change at the C level?  That would make things easy.

There are quite a few, but outside of the big pain point of
strings/byte/unicode which is present at python level as well, a lot
of the issues are not so big (and even simpler to deal with). For
example, although numpy took time to port (and is still experimental
in nature), it took me a couple of hours to get a basic scipy working
(numpy uses a lot of C api dark corners, whereas scipy is much more
straightforward in its usage of the C API).

David