Python 3

[Andrew Bennetts]

Robert Collins wrote:
[...]
> I think that ideally, in a year or so we'd be in a position to make a
> concerted push to make 3 a first class citizen (because 3 is getting
> considerable upstream and in-distribution attention).

To be honest, I'd be inclined to wait.  I don't see much benefit to us
pushing towards Python 3 support at the moment, and conversely I don't
think it'll be any harder to start doing that later — in fact it may get
easier as tools like 2to3 (or 3to2) improve, and it gets easier for us
to consider dropping Python 2.4, etc.

My suspicion is that we simply don't have the resources to make 3 a
first class citizen without a negative impact on our 2.x support, if you
include “no significant performance hit” in the meaning of “first class
citizen”.  The change to bytes and unicode handling seems like something
that will be difficult to support in 2.5 and 3.x from the same code base
without a performance hit, because b"" literals were only added in 2.6.

What benefits do you see?  As far as I can find with Google we've seen a
single inquiry about bzr on Python 3, so there doesn't seem to be much
demand for a port so far.

-Andrew.