[Scons-dev] SCons and Python 3.0

[Russel Winder]

On Wed, 2015-02-25 at 21:28 +0100, info at fibrecode.com wrote:
> Question,
> 
> what's going on on python3-port at all. Is it still active?
> On https://bitbucket.org/scons/scons/branch/python3-port last entry is April
> 2014.

No and yes.

> I like scons and I like python3. I'm not sure, if people really need both
> versions forever.

Sadly Guido extended Python 2.7 EOL from 2017 to 2020, which is an
admission it will never actually go away :-(

On a more serious note, there are some applications, such as Mercurial,
which have indicated they may never to move to Python 3 as they cannot
deal with the change from ASCII to Unicode for strings.

> I installed python2.7 just for scons, and many people are moving forward to
> use python3 only.

Some people do not have that luxury. Although Canonical have taken
Ubuntu to Python 3, Red Hat are still shipping Python 2.6 as their
up-to-date version of Python.

I am a Python 3 only person and only have Python 2 for Mercurial and
SCons. If I had my way Python 2 would be eradicated two years ago!

> Why not put python2.7 in stable branch for maintenance only, and just work
> on python3 in trunk.

Pragmatically, the right place to be is Python 2.7 and Python 3.4
compliance in a single code base. This is fairly straightforward
compared to all other solutions, provided we can get the person power
harnessed – not entirely straightforward in a project with only
volunteer labour. 

It's a pity having said Python 2.7 is the floor version, we keep
supporting 2.6. I understand why sort of, but it doesn't stop me
complaining :-)

-- 
Russel.
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