[Distutils] Distribute without 2to3

[Wichert Akkerman]

On 06/21/2011 11:21 AM, Lennart Regebro wrote:
> On Tue, Jun 21, 2011 at 10:34, Vinay Sajip<vinay_sajip at yahoo.co.uk>  wrote:
>> I'm testing a branch of Python which provides out-of-the-box ability to create
>> virtual enviroments à la virtualenv, and as part of that testing I have to
>> install Distribute in newly created environments a lot. Though normally running
>> 2to3 as part of the Distribute installation is not a big deal, for this testing
>> I'm doing, it does slow things down a little.
>>
>> While waiting for some tests to finish, I thought I might as well look into
>> whether Distribute could be made to run on 2.x and 3.x from a single code base,
>> thereby avoiding the 2to3 step.
>>
>> I've made an attempt, and things seem to have gone reasonably smoothly: the
>> conversion is done and all unit tests pass on 2.7, 3.2, 3.3 (my branch).
> We still need to support Python 2.4, right? That's a trickier issue.
> But including six.py might help.

Afaik you can't catch exceptions in a way that is source-compatible with 
python 3.x and <2.6 due to the switch from "except <class>, <variable> 
to "except <class> as <variable>".

Wichert.