On Monday, April 20, 2015 12:04:14 PM Enrico Zini wrote: > HOWEVER. I am the only person currently looking after all that code, and > my development time on it is mostly spent fixing bugs and implementing > the features that make it useful. See for example [1] and [2] for the > kind of things that are on top of my todo list. > > So, I would welcome help. However, I still have nightmares from the > time of active 2.x development, where at every 2.x python upgrade some > bits of my code started spitting deprecation warnings or stopped > working, and I had to take a day off work to rush into a very unpleasant > emergency forward port, tracking down arbitrary API breakages caused by > someone with commit rights to the python stdlib who had a different > concept of "obscure" than me[3]. > > At the moment, I have a strong guarantee from the python core developers > that my code WILL keep working until 2020, and I will NOT have that > guarantee if I migrate to python 3. I would laugh at this, if it didn't > make me cry first. See my comments at [4]. > > So, if I am left to my own devices, I will *not* consider any porting > effort until late 2019, to make sure that between here and 2020 I will > need to do porting only once from 2 to 3, instead of who knows how many > times from 2.x to 3.4, then from 3.x to 3.x+n at every new Debian stable > release. > > With help (i.e. with people doing the porting work, who I'm happy to > assist), I'm glad to migrate to python 3. But help MUST come also with > someone taking responsibility for guaranteeing that they will ALSO do > the porting work in the future, chasing whatever will break with new 3.x > versions. > > That is a tricky guarantee to make from my point of view, because it has > already happened that at first there was a committed group, and then at > some point things broke, everyone was busy, my ass was the only one on > the line, and I ended up having to take time (two /weeks/ in one > occasion) off paid work for emergency remediation. > > I have a massive amount of stable code deployed, and it *is* being used. > In my experience this is a use case that the python core developers are > not taking much into account[5], so I'm playing defensive until I see a > strong sign that that attitude has changed. I feel your pain. You aren't the first person I've heard this perspective from. Fortunately, it's generally possible to make code bi-lingual python/python3 (much easier than it was with python3 << python3.3). From a porting to and being ready for python3 perspective, it might make sense to work towards making your code base bi-lingual and then switching interpreters at whatever the right time is would be 'not hard'. I think the porting team would do most of the work, we'd just need you to review and integrate changes as they come along. Thanks, Scott K
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