[Python-Dev] email package status in 3.X

[Giampaolo Rodolà]

2010/6/20 Steven D'Aprano <steve at pearwood.info>:
> Python 2.x introduced Unicode strings. Python 3.x merely makes them the
> default.

"Merely"? To me this looks as the main reason why a lot of projects
haven't been ported to Python 3 yet.
I attempted to port pyftpdlib to python 3 several times and the
biggest show stopper has always been the bytes / string difference
introduced by Python 3 which forces you to *know* and *use* Unicode
every time you deal with some text and 2to3 is completely useless
here.
I can only imagine how difficult can it be to do such a conversion in
a project like Twisted or Django where the I/O plays a fundamental
role.

The choice of forcing the user to use Unicode and "think in Unicode"
was a very brave one, and I'm sure it's for the better, but not
everyone wants to deal with that because Unicode is hard to swallow.
The majority of people prefer to stay with bytes and eventually learn
and introduce Unicode only when that is actually needed.


--- Giampaolo
http://code.google.com/p/pyftpdlib
http://code.google.com/p/psutil