Switching to Python 3

[David Malcolm]

On Mon, 2012-08-13 at 20:53 -0400, David Malcolm wrote:
> On Mon, 2012-08-13 at 03:09 -0400, Bohuslav Kabrda wrote:
> > ----- Original Message -----
> > > On 08/06/2012 04:22 AM, Toshio Kuratomi wrote:
> > > > The only distribution that has switched is arch.  When they did
> > > > there was
> > > > a big uproar about how arch was doing something wrong which
> > > > eventually
> > > > resulted in that PEP.
> > > 
> > > Yeah, we mainly wrote PEP 394 in order to nudge *everyone else* into
> > > providing a /usr/bin/python2 symlink to help deal with Arch making
> > > their
> > > bold leap into the unknown (as well as going on record that we think
> > > switching it *right now* is still a bad idea). There's "bleeding
> > > edge"
> > > and then there's "tap dancing on razor blades in your bare feet" :P
> > > 
> > > To be honest, I expect that the long term outcome will be that
> > > "/usr/bin/python" becomes solely the preserve of the OS, with all
> > > cross-platform scripts and applications using "/usr/bin/pythonX",
> > > software collections, or language level virtual environments.
> > > 
> > > From an end user perspective, having things mostly compatible with
> > > both
> > > 2 and 3 should come *before* that symlink gets flipped rather than
> > > after.
> > > 
> > > Cheers,
> > > Nick.
> > > 
> > 
> > Ok, then I would suggest using Tom Spura's idea about making only
> > python2- and python3- packages (maybe with the virtual python-
> > provides for python2- packages, as Toshio has mentioned). We could
> > target this for F19 and we could also start helping various upstreams
> > with switching to python 3 and see where this will take us. Does that
> > sound good?
> If we're looking at this kind of change (python2-foo and python3-foo),
> how about some other prefixes:
>   * python2-debug-foo (or somesuch) for a build of the package against
> the --with-pydebug python2 package
>   * python3-debug-foo
>   * pypy-foo for the package built against PyPy
> 
> FWIW an old idea I had for revamping how we maintain Python packages can
> be seen here:
> http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/python-devel/2010-March/000213.html
The "gitweb" URLs in that mail are stale as fedorapeople.org is now
using cgit; see:
http://fedorapeople.org/cgit/dmalcolm/public_git/rpm-pyconfig.git/tree/