Should non-security 2.7 bugs be fixed?

[Terry Reedy]

On 7/18/2015 10:48 PM, Zachary Ware wrote:
> On Sat, Jul 18, 2015 at 9:13 PM, Terry Reedy <tjreedy at udel.edu> wrote:
>> I understand the general problem quite well.  But feeling that one would
>> have to do a 2.7 backport after writing, editing, or reviewing a 3.x patch
>> can discourage doing a review in the first place. I am at that point now
>> with respect to Idle patches.
>
> I wonder if it would be worth the significant one-time effort to port
> IDLE to 2/3, so that future bugfixes/improvements don't require any
> extra effort than testing them with all versions.

I am not aware of any version problems with tkinter code. In general, in 
the modules I have looked at, the main necessary differences are the 
Tkinter/tkinter, MessageBox/messagebox imports. In some files, the 
exception changes in 3.3 are even more a nuisance, since the name 
differences can be anywhere in the file.

Since 2.7 patching will end sooner or later, I am reluctant to add 'if 
version' to 3.x.  The exception changes could be masked in 2.7 by 
rebinding exception names at the top, but I am not sure that this would 
be a good idea.

I, and others, have already made some changes to eliminate differences 
that are unnecessary, at least for 2.7 versus 3.3+ or now 3.4+.  For 
instance, I believe all 'except X, msg:' statements have been converted 
to 'except X as msg:'.  Most of the files with 'print' still need 
conversion to a future imports + function call.  I have eliminated most 
other differences in at least a couple of modules before patching, and 
in one module that needs multiple patches.

Hmm.  After manual insertion of future print imports in 2.7 files, 2to3 
could be used to convert the 2.7 print statements.  This would be much 
easier than manual conversion and or copying for 3.x.  Thanks for the 
inspiration.
https://bugs.python.org/issue24671

-- 
Terry Jan Reedy