[Python-porting] Recommended Python version?

[David Malcolm]

On Tue, 2010-06-15 at 16:57 +0200, Jürgen Hamel wrote:
> On Tue, 15 Jun 2010 14:49:38 +0200
> "M.-A. Lemburg" <mal at egenix.com> wrote:
> 
> > Shane Kerr wrote:
> 
> > > We started the BIND 10 project a year ago, and picked Python 3 because
> > > we don't expect the software to be production-ready until after 3 years
> > > of work.
> > > 
> > > However, we have concerns because very few systems ship with Python 3
> > > "out of the box" still. We think that early adopters - and later all
> > > adopters - may be put off by this requirement.
> > > 
> > > We're considering back-porting the project from 3.1 to 2.7, and then
> > > maintaining a version of the software that works with both the older 2.x
> > > and the newer 3.x series. Does this make any sense?
> > > 
> FULL ACK, but I do with my project ( http://www.cuon.org ) for the next years only support
> python 2.x. look above for my arguments.
> 
> > Depending on what you want to do with Python, it's probably best
> > to try to write software that works with both Python 2 and 3 -
> > especially if you are targeting a very diverse set of systems.
> > 
> > For backporting from 3 to 2, there's a helper available
> > which may be useful: http://www.startcodon.com/wordpress/?cat=8
> > 
> > Note that most recent Linux distributions do ship with Python3.
> 
> NO !
> Ubuntu Lucid Lynx  - preinstalled python 2.6.5 - and Lucid Lynx  is a LTS version
> Gentoo -  preinstalled python 2.6.5 
> Debian Lenny - python 2.5.2
> Fedora 13  - python 2.6.4

Fedora 13 ships both python 2 and python 3 stacks, which are installable
in parallel: in addition to the "python" rpm which is 2.6.4, there's a
"python3" rpm, which is 3.1.2.

We ship quite a few python 3 modules on top of the core runtime.  See:
https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Features/Python3F13#Porting_status
for the gory details.

Hope this is helpful
Dave