The real problem with Python 3 - no business case for conversion (was "I strongly dislike Python 3")

[Carl Banks]

On Jul 7, 2:10 pm, Brendan Abel <007bren... at gmail.com> wrote:
> > > > One thing that would be very useful is how to maintain something that
> > > > works on 2.x and 3.x, but not limiting yourself to 2.6. Giving up
> > > > versions below 2.6 is out of the question for most projects with a
> > > > significant userbase IMHO. As such, the idea of running the python 3
> > > > warnings is not so useful IMHO - unless it could be made to work
> > > > better for python 2.x < 2.6, but I am not sure the idea even makes
> > > > sense.
>
> The entire fact that 3.x was *designed* to be incompatible should tell
> you that supporting 2.x and 3.x with a single code base is a bad idea,
> except for the very smallest of projects.  This is the point where a
> project should fork and provide two different versions.

Well, I think it could be a reasonable thing to maintain a single
codebase in 2.x and use 2to3 (and/or a custom translator) to translate
to 3.x version for quite a while.

For the humble library I maintain, I plan to release a Python 3
version as soon as a Python 3 version of numpy is released, maintain a
single codebase (translating from 2 version to 3) for awhile, then at
some point fork them and maintain them separately.

Given that I add features about once every 2 years I don't think it'll
be too much of a burden, though.


Carl Banks