[SciPy-User] SciPy ecosystem and Python 3

[josef.pktd at gmail.com]

On Mon, Jul 1, 2013 at 7:55 PM, Thomas Kluyver <takowl at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 30 June 2013 20:04, Ralf Gommers <ralf.gommers at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>> That's not quite what I meant. Even on a work pc on which I don't have
>> admin rights I will be able to install Anaconda or another distribution. All
>> the basic examples in Python and numpy/scipy docs will work. But I don't
>> work in a vacuum, so I'll find out at some later stage that some code that
>> my co-workers wrote depends on version (current minus 2) of some package
>> that only supports 3.x in version (current). This should be the exception
>> and not the norm before recommending 3.x imho.
>
>
> Again, though, I think your coworkers are more likely to have written code
> which expects Python 2, than Python-3-compatible code which relies on an
> older version of a particular library. But that's a chicken and egg problem,
> and if we always pointed newcomers at the option most likely to preserve
> compatibility with prior code, then we'd never have started using Python at
> all.
>
> Hans also has a good point: if you're working in a group with a Python
> codebase, they should show you how to set up the preferred environment for
> that. I also imagine that we'll need to maintain a warning for some time
> after we start recommending Python 3, along the lines of "If you find code
> that doesn't work, it might be that it was never updated to run on Python
> 3." That's not ideal, but I think being able to point newcomers at the
> 'latest and greatest' version by default will still be an important
> improvement.
>
> To my mind, the crucial prerequisite is getting robust Python 3 support in
> the packages that we (the open source SciPy community) develop. Someone has
> added quite a long list to the Etherpad (Thanks!), but some of them seem
> quite specialist, e.g. I've never even heard of Gamera or kwant before. I
> don't think we should hold the recommendation on every specific package that
> we can find, so the question is which of those packages are important.
>
> Obviously that's somewhat subjective, so here's a couple of possible
> criteria to debate: A project is 'important' if
> - It's relevant outside one specific field of study (i.e. we wouldn't block
> the general recommendation on a package specific to, say, quantum physics),
> and
> - It's recommended by blog posts/tutorials/textbooks independent of the
> project and its main authors.

I think it would be better to have a central list where
users/developers can add information about field specific packages. It
won't help those users if the scientific python core is available but
some crucial packages in their field are not available on python 3.

And not all fields have big communities that can do it on their own.

Josef


>
> Here's the pad again: https://etherpad.mozilla.org/JdAHGQihei
>
> Thanks,
> Thomas
>
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