Hi all,
I'm building on the work done by Dominic and Mickael to get all the proton
python bits to work under both python2 and python3. See [1].
I think this will entail a lot of little changes to the python sources and the
unit tests. Rather than check in a single huge patch, I'm going to break it up
over several patches.
The first bunch of patches will simply 'modernize' the existing python code.
Old style syntax that is not forward compatible with python 3 will be replaced
(eg. print "foo" --> print("foo"), etc). I'll use a tool called 'futurize'
which is part of the python future toolset [2], [3].
Once all python code is updated, then I'll begin introducing python 3 specific
patches, including the work already done by Dominic and Mickael. Of course
I'll verify that none of these changes will break python 2. I've got a local
CI system that can build/test in both environments.
>From a discussion with Dominic, we agreed that it would be A Good Thing to use
>one of the existing Py2 <--> Py3 abstraction libraries. These libraries
>provide utilities for writing code that works under both python versions.
>I've used 'six' in the past [4] and found it quite helpful - it will eliminate
>a lot of the messy conditional code one has to hack in order to support both
>languages.
However, this library is not part of the standard python library. This means
introducing a new dependency.
Personally, I don't think this is a big deal - use of 'six' is ubiquitous among
python packages. It's available freely via pypi, and though most distros.
So that's the Big Question - is everyone comfortable with this additional
dependency? Does anyone have a better alternative? Has anyone ported other
large python codebases - what was your experience?
thanks,
-K
[1] https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/PROTON-490
[2] http://python-future.org/index.html
[3] http://python-future.org/futurize_cheatsheet.html
[4] https://pythonhosted.org/six/
--
-K
