On Sun, Dec 17, 2017 at 11:02:48AM +0100, Xen wrote: > My topic was that Ubuntu obviously never opposed any of the changes, and > most replying here pretty much evidence that they are in favour of them. > > Now, they claim that they can do nothing against upstream and that they have > to follow the developments, that they are defending at every moment > themselves!!!! > > It's playing the victim while you are playing a leading role in making it > happen.
Observing that something is out of scope is not playing the victim. Ubuntu exists, in part, to get recent versions of free software into the hands of users as straightforwardly as possible. For the most part we aren't programming language designers, and running a campaign against how the custodians of the Python language have chosen to design the latest version of that language is simply out of scope in this project. The economics are obvious in any case. Enough people want to use the latest version of the language that it's a clear requirement for us to provide it. In general we want to avoid shipping multiple versions of things where possible, because that's a maintenance burden. The Python 2-to-3 transition has been such that we've had no choice but to do so in this case, but the maintenance burden for us is only going to get worse once Python 2 stops being supported upstream. Thus it's clearly in our long-term interest to put effort into moving things over to Python 3 in ways that fall within the remit of a distribution. The Python packaging teams within most other major distributions have made much the same obvious decision, explicitly or implicitly. We are absolutely taking a role in making it happen as smoothly as possible (though you give us too much credit by saying that it's a leading role), and I don't think anyone involved is ashamed of this. This is not the same as saying that we're powerless victims. When we have issues with Python, we take them to the appropriate places, rather than posting long screeds to inappropriate mailing lists. Several Ubuntu developers over the years have been active contributors to Python upstream. Many of the changes in Python 3 releases have been the result of people working on updating their code to the latest version of the language, finding rough edges in the process, and discussing those in the right place so that they could be smoothed out. (For example, Python 3.3 reintroduced the u'...' syntax for Unicode strings even though it's strictly redundant, to make things easier for people forward-porting code; 3.5 restored "bytes % args", as mentioned recently; and so on.) These wouldn't have happened if people had stuck their heads in the sand and decided that they were going to hold on to Python 2 for dear life; they happened because people decided that it was better for the world if they collaborated to help build a better language. And when you actually want many of the changes involved, that's the very opposite of playing the victim! I want to use Python 3 for the large codebases I help to maintain (when they aren't using Python 3 already, as several of them are). A few things I positively want to use are: * async/await syntax for coroutines; we do the best we can at the moment with things like @defer.inlineCallbacks in Twisted, but it's fiddly and ugly; * many improvements to the standard library's subprocess module; as one example, I filed https://bugs.python.org/issue1652, and while I can work around it or use a backport, the whole point was to make the improved behaviour available to everyone since the old behaviour was a nasty gotcha; * much more sensible behaviour related to inheritance of file descriptors across forks; * the enum module; * contextlib.ExitStack, which allows replacing some very cumbersome constructions in Python 2; * much more flexible/programmable access to module importing. I mean, this is just off the top of my head, but hopefully it makes the point: sure, there are some stumbling blocks involved in porting to Python 3 (typically fewer of them in newer versions), but there are more than enough good things for it to be worthwhile in my opinion. I can get some of these with backported libraries, but not all, and in any case that sort of thing gets very cumbersome. Based on what you've said about how long it'd take to port all your code, it seems that you have rather little investment in Python; in fact, to be honest it sounds like you've spent more time in total writing inflammatory emails about it here than actually writing Python code. So why not spend some time listening to the views of people here who spend a lot of time writing Python code, as well as just the negative posts you found on the internet (some of which have since fed into improving the language anyway)? > No one here has evidenced being opposed to the forced nature of its > discontinuation, except for mr. Watson in saying that he would have > preferred a 'legacy' mode for the interpreter. I've explained already why I don't think it's particularly forced, and I'd also add that I do recognise that such a "legacy" mode would have been extremely difficult to build - retaining the ability to execute Python 2 code is one thing, but in practice you'd need to be able to pass data between the two worlds and to say the least it's not at all obvious how that could work (Perl 5 vs. 6 doesn't have this problem). Anyway, it's the nature of things that older versions of software are rarely maintained in perpetuity, so I find it pretty hard to get worked up about it. (Incidentally, I find it pretty weird when anyone who isn't, say, my bank manager or something refers to me using a title. You don't seem to do that for other people in general, so I assume you're trying to make some kind of point, but I'm afraid it escapes me.) -- Colin Watson [cjwat...@ubuntu.com] -- Ubuntu-devel-discuss mailing list Ubuntu-devel-discuss@lists.ubuntu.com Modify settings or unsubscribe at: https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-devel-discuss
