If you build the gremlin-python module you will get an error related to pypi. Robert Dale was good enough to provide me the link that help firm up in my mind something I'd already run into on the last release with pypi:
https://mail.python.org/pipermail/distutils-sig/2017-October/031712.html This breaks our build as Jython - perhaps more specifically the Jython build plugin - is not updated to support this change. Given that there's been no activity on that plugin in the last 12 months, I'm not sure we can expect to see a fix quickly. While I looked into what might be necessary to offer a patch, I wondered why we need the added build of Jython at all. It was necessary when we first got started with gremlin-python because we didn't have a good native build, but now we have a really nice one and actually test both Python 2 and 3. And now with the work I've been doing to build the GLV test suite we can get full round trip testing of Gremlin in native python which has already proven to be more effective than the Jython stuff as I've uncovered python bugs that the Jython tests didn't. If we dropped the jython build we could save some build processing time too. So, to summarize, I'm wondering if there is any reason anyone can think of to keep the Jython build around given the good testing we have with the native python system. I don't want to rush this discussion, but given that we can't currently build our software, this is a fairly critical situation. I will immediately "ignore" the Jython build sequence and CTR that in so that we can at least build without error. If there are no objections in the next 72 hours I'll assume lazy consensus and do a full removal. Then when the GLV test suite is ready we can all feel comfortable again.