Re: Policy for "Specifying Supported Versions" for Python3

[Scott Kitterman <debian@kitterman.com>]

On Monday, June 21, 2010 05:40:37 pm Barry Warsaw wrote:
> On Jun 20, 2010, at 04:28 PM, Scott Kitterman wrote:
> >> I'm going to declare rough consensus around this approach and I'll have
> >> a Python policy patch for review shortly.
> 
> I haven't had time to read this through yet, but I recently posted some
> information related to Python on Debian and Ubuntu and requested off-list
> feedback.  One of the more interesting messages I got was from someone who
> was trying to install a package that has been ported to Python 3, is
> available on Ubuntu for both Python 2 and 3, and wanted one command to
> install both binary packages.  He was using Synaptic but I don't think
> that matters.
> 
> It seems to me that the right way to handle this would be meta-packages
> that included dependencies on both the Python 2 and Python 3 version of
> the underlying packages.  Maybe we should consider supporting this, and
> coming up with an agreed-upon naming scheme.
> 
> E.g. for Python package 'foo', we'd have:
> 
>  * python-foo - the binary package for foo in Python 2
>  * python3-foo - the binary package for foo in Python 3
>  * python-2and3-foo - for the meta package that installs both of the above
> 
> "python-2and3-foo" is probably a crappy naming convention.
> 
> 1) Is this a good idea?
> 2) Can you suggest a better name?
> 

I think most people install Python modules and extensions as dependencies of 
applications they care to use.  For Python developers that actually care about 
such things, I think it's better that the just install both manually.

If we maintain a standard that if in Python you import foo, then the Python 
package name is python-foo and the Python3 package is names python3-foo, I 
would think this is manageable.  I think that adding this metapackage would 
impose a lot of complexity on packagers and/or python helper maintainers, 
bloat the Packages.gz file signficantly, and probably provide confusing search 
results.

I'm not sure what the best answer is, but I'm not sure there is one that's 
even good.

Scott K