[Python-Dev] RELEASED Python 3.0 final

[Guido van Rossum]

On Fri, Dec 5, 2008 at 10:03 PM,  <glyph at divmod.com> wrote:
> The best thing for 3.0 adoption would be a 3.0 "welcoming committee".  A
> group of hackers wandering from one popular open source library to another,
> writing patches for 3.x compatibility issues.  There must be lots of people
> who care about 3.x adoption, and this is probably the most effective way
> they can reach that goal.
>
> Each time I am going to fix a 3.0 compatibility issue, I have a choice: I
> can either make Twisted itself better (add features, fix bugs), or I can
> keep Twisted exactly the same but do lots of work so it will work on 3.0.
>  It seems pretty clear to me that, to the extent that I have time for
> Twisted, fixing bugs in the HTTP implementation would be a better deal than
> puzzling through a megabyte of diffs generated by 2to3, trying to understand
> where it went wrong, and how.
>
> This doesn't mean I'm "sitting on my hands".  It just means I have better
> things to be doing with my hands.  (To be precise, 1054 better things to do,
> re: Twisted.  Add in the Divmod projects and it's more like 3000.)
>
> Of course the distant threat of an unmaintained 2.x series is enough to
> motivate me to push a *little* in this direction, but it doesn't make me
> happy about it.
>
> I think this is exactly what the marketing effort around 3.0 needs to be
> doing: making a positive case for library and application authors to spend
> time to update to 3.x.  This is a lot of work, and many (I might even say
> most) of us need a lot of cajoling.  Free patches are a good incentive :).

This is a really good idea. I hope and expect that the information and
tools available for porting to 3.0 will dramatically improve over the
next half year or so (hopefully the situation is a lot less gloomy
already by the time we meet again at PyCon). The porting list that was
just created also sounds like a step in the right direction.

I do think that in many cases *some* support from the regular
maintainers of a library would be needed -- for example if you (in
particular) were to express a negative attitude towards porting
Twisted to 3.0 (I'm not saying that you do, it's just a hypothetical
that would apply to any "BDFL" for any sizable library) then this
would discourage others from trying to contribute. OTOH if you made a
branch available where you check in the results of running 2to3 over
Twisted, with instructions for people to contribute fixes, that would
be great -- at almost no cost to you! (Assuming you can get someone
else to work on merging trunk improvements into that branch.) Remember
the open source mantra -- reap the benefit of all those eyeballs!

-- 
--Guido van Rossum (home page: http://www.python.org/~guido/)