[Python-Dev] Bring new features to older python versions

[Giampaolo Rodolà]

Thanks everybody for your feedback.
I created a gcode project here:
http://code.google.com/p/pycompat/

2011/10/8 Antoine Pitrou <solipsis at pitrou.net>:
> There's also some stuff there that is coded in C, or that will rely on
> some functionality of the core interpreter that is not easily
> emulated on previous versions. But I suppose you'll find that out by
> yourself.

Yep, I'm still not sure what to do about this.
I guess I'll just ignore that stuff in all those cases where rewriting
it in python is too much effort.

Toshio Kuratomi <a.badger at gmail.com> wrote:
> I have a need to support a small amount of code as far back as python-2.3
> I don't suppose you're interested in that as well? ;-)

I'm still not sure; 2.3 version is way too old (it doesn't even have
decorators).
It might make sense only in case the lib gets widely used, which I doubt.
Personally, at some point I deliberately dropped support for 2.3 from
all of my code/lib, mainly because I couldn't use decorators. so I
don't have a real need to do this.

2011/10/9 Éric Araujo <merwok at netwok.org>:
> The issues I foresee with your lib are more technical: First, it looks
> like a big bag of backported modules, classes and functions without
> defined criterion for inclusion (“cool new stuff”?).

I'd say the criterion for inclusion is putting in everything which can
be (re)written in python 2.4, such as any, all,
collections.defaultdict and property setters/deleters (2.6).
Pretty much all the stuff written in C would be left out, maybe with
the exception of functools module which is important (for me at
least), in which case I might try to rewrite it in pure Python.
I'm sharing your same doubts though.
Maybe this isn't worth the effort in the first place.
I'll try to write some more code and see whether this is a good
candidate for a "public module".
If not I'll just get back to use it as an internal "private" module.

2011/10/9 Éric Araujo <merwok at netwok.org>:
> keep on lumping new things until Python 3.4?  3.8?  Won’t that become
> unmanageable (boring/huge/hard)?

I don't think it makes sense to go over than 3.2 version.
Folks which are forced to use python 2.4 are already avoing to use 2.6
and 2.7 features, let alone 3.X only features.
Plus, python 3.2 was already the latest 3.X version which still had
something in common with 2.7.


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