Dirkjan Ochtman wrote: > On Sat, Sep 19, 2009 at 19:06, Alex Legler <a...@gentoo.org> 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. Everything would be fine if all the users read news items, forums, mailing lists and web pages - but they don't. It will get missed by many many users - too many for something that breaks portage, in my opinion. I would suggest the developers keep python 3.1 out of stable until it is supported by portage, puthon-updater and eselect at minimum (ie. you can easily revert to 2.6). While writing this an alternative solution has occurred to me: Make sure portage dependencies are correct so that python doesn't get dep-cleaned (a brief check of the portage 2.1.6.7 ebuild makes it look like this currently isn't the case - surely this should've been done as soon as it was known portage didn't support python 3!) and perhaps add a block to eselect so that python-3.1 can't be selected as the system python interpreter until portage supports it. AllenJB
