Re: [gentoo-dev] Stabilization of Python 3.1

[Petteri Räty]

Arfrever Frehtes Taifersar Arahesis wrote:
> 2009-09-19 20:20:10 AllenJB napisał(a):
>> Dirkjan Ochtman wrote:
>>> On Sat, Sep 19, 2009 at 19:06, Alex Legler <a3li@g.o> wrote:
>>>> What is the point of stabilizing it if users shouldn't use it as main
>>>> interpreter? Just leave it in ~arch until it can be safely used.
>>> Making it easily available so that people can port stuff, so that the
>>> entire world may be able to use it as their main interpreter sooner?
>>>
>>> Seriously, it's out there, there's no reason to keep it from stable.
>>> Just prevent people from making python invoke 3.x and everything will
>>> be fine.
>>>
>>> Cheers,
>>>
>>> Dirkjan
>>>
>> Yes, there is a very good reason: The sanity of the users and those who
>> support them.
>>
>> As a user who has spent a lot of time on IRC and the forums supporting
>> other users, I think I can safely say that stabilizing a version of
>> python which is not supported by portage will end up in a nightmare
>> scenario. At the very least portage, python-updater and eselect, if not
>> the majority of the commonly used tools (whichever of gentoolkit,
>> portage-utils, eix, etc use python), should support python 3.1 before it
>> goes stable.
>
> python-updater and eselect are written in bash. portage-utils are written
> in C. eix is written in C++.
>
>> perhaps add a block to eselect so that python-3.1 can't be selected as
>> the system python interpreter until portage supports it.
>
> Users might want to sometimes temporarily switch to Python 3 to test some
> Portage-unrelated code.
> Anyway Portage will support Python 3 soon.
>

The users who test code usually have the skills to unmask the things
they need. Stabling 3.x should bring benefit to people who don't write
anything in python because it will be upgraded for all users. If we
don't make 3.x part of system then we can talk about stabilizing it.

Regards,
Petteri