[Oneiric-Foundations-Topic]Python Goals

[Barry Warsaw]

Apologies for the long delayed response.

On Apr 01, 2011, at 01:11 PM, Scott Kitterman wrote:

>On Friday, April 01, 2011 12:58:37 PM Barry Warsaw wrote:
>> Agreed.  Can you elaborate on what "experimental support for Python3 as the
>> Python that is shipped on the various Ubuntu ISOs" means to you?  Does that
>> mean no Python 2.7 on the ISO?  Also, by "experimental" do you mean having
>> a process for creating alternative CDs that have only Python 3.2 but not
>> on the standard daily CDs?

>There is a lot of Python code in the Ubuntu insfrastructure.  I'm not sure 
>exactly what I meant by that, but here's an example:
>
>Ubiquity is written in Python.  It's a reasonably complex program that is non-
>trivial to maintain and improve.  It's also mission critical for Ubuntu.  I 
>would be really suprised if it was fully ported with no regressions in one 
>cycle.  In this case, I think "experimental support" would be a python3 branch 
>that ~works, but may not be fully tested/have issues/or not be at feature 
>parity so we wouldn't want to switch to it in the oneiric cycle.
>
>The goal would be to have it be mature enough during oneiric that in the "P" 
>cycle we could switch to it early and have it land ~smoothly for the LTS.
>
>I know there are others.  
>
>My impression is that most upstreams for core desktop packages support 
>Python3.  Mostly what we lack is packaging changes to support it.  My 
>expectation is that most of the challenge around a Python3 desktop in "P" will 
>be around more peripheral modules/extensions and custom Ubuntu code.
>
>That shouldn't preclude shipping some Python3 stuff in oneiric if it's ready 
>and we've got room on the relevant image.
>
>Does that help?

It does, thanks.  I wonder, with work going on in Launchpad to support
derivatives, can we pervert that to create a Python 3 Ubuntu derivative that
could be used for this experiment?  It may not be fully functional, but I
think it would be a great test and status tracker for how well our Python 3
efforts are going.

Maybe it's not a good feature-fit, but rather than (or better, in addition to)
tracking individual packages, I think it would be really helpful to have an
integrated system image that you could test drive and report bugs against.  I
don't think we'd need that right away, as the focus will initially be on
getting individual libraries and applications ported, but once we have
reasonable coverage on that, the Python 3 image will help us identify the
holes.

-Barry
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