Python 2 to 3 conversion - embrace the pain

[Chris Angelico]

On Sat, Mar 14, 2015 at 10:14 AM, Ned Deily <nad at acm.org> wrote:
> In article <mdvq76$rit$1 at dont-email.me>, John Nagle <nagle at animats.com>
> wrote:
>>    All the bugs I'm discussing reflect forced package
>> changes or upgrades.  None were voluntary on my part.
>
> You would have run into the SSL certificate issue if you upgraded your
> Python 2 instance to the current Python 2.7.9.

And the same applies to many MANY other upgrades. I was trying to
delve into a VLC issue by compiling the latest version from source
control, but it wouldn't build with the version of
libsomething-or-other that shipped with Debian Wheezy, so I had to
upgrade that... and then it needed a newer Linux kernel as well, I
think, but at that point I accepted building from a couple dozen
commits ago.

If you upgrade your Python from 2.3 to 2.7, you'll find some breakage,
too. Any upgrade can do that. That's why stable OS releases don't just
randomly upgrade you... which is a bit of a pain for people who want
to distribute Python code that will "just work", but it sure is better
than something unexpectedly going belly-up on a live server!

ChrisA