Proposal: Python 3 in Fedora 13

Haïkel Guémar karlthered at gmail.com
Fri Oct 2 09:20:35 UTC 2009


Le 02/10/2009 09:46, Christof Damian a écrit :
> 
> Do we have an idea how far our stack is from working on python3 ?
> 
> And how far all the rest of python packages is?
> 

Not much, there are few external modules working though the list is
slowly growing (pyqt4, openCV etc, libxml...). Here are some python3
modules hosted on PyPI
http://pypi.python.org/pypi?:action=browse&c=533&show=all

> I think at one point the decision to switch to python3 has do be done
> and some packages will be left behind (at least for a while). It is
> just a question when the switch will happen.
> 

There should be no discussion of switching to python3 as default
interpreter before the upcoming python 2.7.
Python 2.7 is planned to the last offspring of python2.x and to further
reduce the gap between python2 and python3.


> A parallel python3 stack now would mostly be usable for people using
> python3 for work and for these a separate repo would be enough, they
> probably will need this for RHEL/CentOS too.
> 

It won't.
*BSD, fellow GNU/Linux distro like Debian, Mandriva, Ubuntu even
macports are able to ship multiples python stacks and we (Fedora) are
not ? Isn't Fedora supposed to lead ?
Since Python is parallel installable by design, our main issues are to
deal with packaging guidelines (naming, possible conflicts, etc ...) and
considering porting our own python modules and/or fixing them to ease
the port.

Though a separate repo would help to identify and fix possible
conflicts, we should be able to provide a minimal python3 stack for F-13
(and maybe F-12 through updates) and eventually few blessed third-party
modules. After all, others are already shipping it or will ship it in
their next release.
Besides, that would encourage python modules maintainers to port and
test their modules on python3.



Besides, the longer we wait, the harder/longer the transition will be.

H.




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