[Python-Dev] Python-3 transition in Arch Linux

Fri Nov 5 17:09:38 CET 2010

Thomas Wouters writes:
 > > This is unrealistic. It would seriously annoy Arch's intended
 > > audience. (Eg, recently I've become a lot more favorable to using
 > > Word instead of OOo because Word doesn't pop up a useless warning
 > > every time I save a .doc file.) Practically speaking, it would have
 > > to be off by default, like Python pending deprecation warnings.
 > 
 > Wait, what? Warning about impending brokenness is *more annoying* than just
 > plain breaking? How on earth would the warning be "useless"?
 > Keep in mind that the warning would only show up *if stuff would otherwise
 > not work*.
As I understood it, what you proposed was that in a *Python 2-based*
distribution thinking about switching to Python 3 as the default
/usr/bin/python, they should first substitute a bitch'n'run-python2
script for the python (Python 2) binary, and after that works the bugs
out, switch to Python 3.
In that scenario, the bitching is useful *exactly* once: the first
time anybody reports the bug to someone who can do something about it.
But for some time, *every time* you run your app, it bitches
uselessly: it would work fine if you just install Python 2 as
/usr/bin/python, without bitching. That's not very graceful. And
"some time" will often stretch into weeks or months for any given
user, since few distros will bless a new package with zero testing.
 > No, that's not my point at all. The problem isn't that Python 3 is
 > incompatible with Python 2. The problem is that stuff broke without
 > (apparently) fair warning.
Warning was given; they weren't listening.