On Sat, 05 Apr 2014 00:02:58 -0500, Mark H Harris wrote: > Having said that, I do believe that the migration to C python3 has > been too conservative.
Why? Is it a race? Does Python 2.x turn into PHP at midnight? Some people think the move to Python 3 has been too radical and too fast for them. Are they wrong? > Nobody wants to maintain a fork, not really. There will be no serious fork of Python 2.7. Oh, I dare say that when the core developers finally announce Python 2.7 is end-of-lifed, probably in another five or so years, there will be a flurry of cheap talk about forking Python, and maybe even a few "Python2.8" projects on Github. But nobody will use them, and they will fade away into obscurity. I can't see *anyone* with the necessary resources taking on the job and gathering enough community support for a successful fork. With perhaps one exception. Twisted has apparently said they cannot migrate to 3.x. They might, I suppose, take up maintenance of Python 2.7. But I doubt it. I expect that when push comes to shove in 4 or 5 years time, they'll find a way to migrate. Python 2.7 will continue to get paid-for support from RedHat until 2024, and I expect that there will be companies like Activestate that will offer extended support for Python 2.7 for a few years too. But that's it. > I don't think its something anyone should be afraid of. Nobody is *afraid* of a fork. But forks do split the community, and introduce FUD (Fear, Uncertainty, Doubt), except for the rare occasions like the XFree86 to X.Org fork where the entire community moved almost overnight to the fork. That was a HUGE vote of no confidence to the original maintainer, and (so I'm told) deservedly so. Nothing like that is plausible with Python. There simply isn't anywhere near that level of dissatisfaction with the way the language is being managed, mild grumbling from a few people aside. Most importantly, the core devs have been *very* responsive to people's complaints. > Somebody should > put a date on C python 3.4+ migration and cut off support for 2.7.x/ 2045-04-01. If you're not migrated to Python 3.4 by then, no cake for you. A date will be set when the time is right, but rushing to set a date now when we don't know the state of the language in five years time is just silly. It is expected to be five years from now, but if there is a flurry of migration activity it may be brought forward, and if five years is not long enough it may be delayed. *May* be delayed. It's fine if people don't migrate to 3.4. Waiting until 3.5 or even 3.6 is perfectly acceptable too. Leaving it to 3.7 (expected about 5 years from now) is probably okay too. The longer you wait to migrate, the easier it will be: migrate when the benefit of migrating exceeds the cost. (I'm talking about application-level projects here. Libraries and frameworks are somewhat different.) Each point release of 3.x has added not just new features to entice users, but new features (and sometimes old features) to aid in porting. For example, some things that had been dropped, like the callable() built- in, were re-added in 3.2. 3.3 re-added the u'' syntax solely to aid in porting from 2.x. There is a lot of discussion going on to make it easier to deal with mixed bytes and ASCII text, which is a very important use- case which by accident was suited well to the Python 2.x byte-string model, but not well suited to the Python 3.x unicode-text versus bytes model. You should expect that to come into production in 3.5. > Its > just an opinion. If 'Twisted' isn't ready for 3.x, well, they need to > get ready. Are you volunteering to do the work for them? > That's also just an opinion. Ah, but is it an *informed* opinion? Do you know why Twisted say they cannot migrate to 3.x? -- Steven D'Aprano http://import-that.dreamwidth.org/ -- https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
