On Thu, Mar 11, 2010 at 02:24:46AM +0100, Ben de Groot wrote: > On 11 March 2010 01:25, William Hubbs <willi...@gentoo.org> wrote: > > ??If someone has a package that truly works with either python 2 or 3, > > ??what is the harm in automatically pulling in python 3 and installing > > ??the package for both python 2 and 3? > > > > ??As long as pulling in python-3 doesn't change the system's default > > ??python interpretor I don't see a problem with having them both > > ??installed. > I've seen enough python-3 specific bugs to know it is not without > problems. It's a waste of time and resources for something that is > not ready to be used anyway. While it can be argued that that is > what our testing branch is for, it is certainly not something that > should be pushed to stable users. What does upstream say about python 3.1? Are they calling it stable? Yes, it is incompatible with python-2, but, it is set up so both can be on a system at the same time. I'm no expert on python, but I think even upstream has python deliberately set up that way.
> Even if it would be just "dead weight", it is not something we should > wish for. It is bloat, it is unnecessary, and causes more problems > than that it solves. Why should users have to compile multiple > python versions, if they only use one anyway? If they are only using python-2 and all of the packages they use only work with python-2, then the dependencies of the packages should be fixed to reflect that. Even if python-3 is stable and the dependencies of the packages they have say that they only support python-2 python-3 will not be on their systems. Someone compared pythohn to gcc earlier in this thread, but I'm not sure that is a fair comparison. AFAIK, gcc is not slotted by upstream, and python is. I think that makes a difference in how we handle it. William
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