Migration to Python 3.x

[Ralf Gommers]

On Wed, Aug 10, 2016 at 2:46 PM, Nelle Varoquaux <nelle.varoquaux at gmail.com>
wrote:

> On 9 August 2016 at 19:17, Ralf Gommers <ralf.gommers at gmail.com> wrote:
> >
> >
> > On Wed, Aug 10, 2016 at 1:55 PM, Nelle Varoquaux <
> nelle.varoquaux at gmail.com>
> > wrote:
> >>
> >> On 9 August 2016 at 17:28, Juan Nunez-Iglesias <jni.soma at gmail.com>
> wrote:
> >> > @Emmanuelle I'm probably among the ones pushing hardest for this, and
> I
> >> > can
> >> > tell you, I can't wait for this change in policy, and would be sorely
> >> > disappointed by having to work in an experimental branch of
> >> > scikit-image.
> >> > Both @-matmul and keyword-only arguments are, imho, compelling reasons
> >> > to
> >> > switch. (Imagine the amount of fiddling with the API that we could do
> >> > with
> >> > keyword-only arguments, without the annoying deprecation cycle!)
> >> >
> >> > @Ralf I would argue in favour of 3.5, for the above reasons and
> because
> >> > anyone who had the temerity to update to 3.4 is very likely to
> >> > subsequently
> >> > move to 3.5. (Self-selected group of early adopters, plus no backwards
> >> > incompatibility issues between the two versions.)
> >
> >
> > I agree with this argument, I was just asking to clarify. @ is at least
> > something interesting that's specifically added for scientific users, so
> > imho 3.5 is the first 3.x release where in some cases the benefits may
> start
> > to be worth the costs.
> >
> >>
> >> That implies that even ubuntu users will have to install python from
> >> another source than the package manager. Do you really want this? That
> >> means that only fairly advance python users will be able to use the
> >> latest scikit-image release.
> >
> >
> > In the grand scheme of things, does Ubuntu matter much for this decision?
> > There are way more Windows and OS X users, so if it's OK for them (which
> is
> > not a given) then it should also be OK for those fewer and on average
> more
> > computer-literate Ubuntu users.
>
> I don't have a good overview of what OS people are using, but in the
> different research facilities I've worked or visited, it was always
> linux based, and users where not really tech-savy. I checked on all of
> the servers (UW's genome science, the Curie institute, UC Berkeley's
> stats department, the Mines' machine learning computing facilities.) I
> have access to, none have python3.5. Some of these servers are
> "offline", thus conda is useless. All of these research institutes
> have teams that use in some way image processing.
>
> I'll just also mentionned that we had a keynote at scipy this year
> mentionning she was using python because she just did not have the
> time anymore to code in C++ and Java. These are the kind of people
> that may be using scikit-image, that may be interested in the latest
> version of the package, and yet just not have the time to compile
> python3.5 from scratch on an outdated server.
>

Fair enough, but there are likely much more outdated servers with Python
2.7 than with Python 3.4 on them .....

Ralf
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://mail.python.org/pipermail/scikit-image/attachments/20160810/f3bbe95e/attachment.html>