On Sunday 11 January 2009 03:49:53 Uwe Stöhr wrote: > Python 2.6 changes a lot and was released to make it easier to switch to > Python 3. Python 2.6 is compatible to Python 2.5 and to Python 3.0.
python 2.6 is not compatible with python 3.0, one of the most flagrant examples is print that is a statement previous to 3.0 and a function in 3.0 (and further). > While > Python 3.0 is not compatible to Python 2.5. Because Python 3.0 was released > a month ago, it will soon be preinstalled by Linux distributions so that > then perhaps not all of our scripts will do what should or won't work. No quite as fast. I am running python 2.6 in fedora rawhide (development for F11) and the plan there is to continue with the 2.x series (2.7 will be released and 2.8 is expected as well). The idea with new releases is to keep the compatibility with the previous python versions while at the same time it provides better transitions diagnose and tools to convert to the 3.x versions. My advice is thus to continue with python 2.x for some time. > I'm > not a Pythonist and therefore not able to do this job, but it would be nice > if our Python gurus could have a look if all of our scripts also work with > Python 3.0. The procedure is simple: Run every script with Python 2.6. > Every warning one gets needs to be fixed to be able to run it correctly > with Python 3.0. Of course once can also use directly Python 3.0 to test. I am not against this plan but I think that we should focus in 2.x. If we keep the warnings to a minimum we should be able to jump to 3.x as soon as decided. Honestly I expect us to jump directly from python 2.x (with x being 4) to python 3.1 (or even possibly 3.2). I am waiting also for other improvements in python 3 so for the moment I don't think we gain anything with jumping over python 3.0. Even if I did not care about the installations issues I would recommend to stay with python 2.6 for the moment. In case you could think that I am hostile to python 3.0 I can assure you that this is not the case. I like all the changes that have been done and python 3 is a better language than python 2. For the next stable release python 2.3 seems a nice target. Eventually we could go up to require python 2.4 (now we require python 2.3.4). -- José Abílio
