Phil Stracchino writes: > Rewriting without breaking is hard.
True. > There is a Python framework called Twisted. Not an example appropriate to Mailman, though. The Twisted people were doing amazing things with str, to which Unicode was irrelevant, because their job was to shovel bytes from here to there correctly but as fast as possible. (Mercurial has a similar story, and a similar visceral hatred for Python 3.) Mailman has the opposite problem. We *wish* str was Unicode from the get-go, but it wasn't, and Mailman 2 is rife with potential encoded/ decoded confusion because of the nature of email and the dual usage of str in Python 1, and the history of Mailman as an MLM for an American rock band (who needs no steekin' accents, we just hammer and bend the strings!) There are two decades of hacks and patches in Mailman 2 to catch the squirmers that somehow manage to be str where unicode is needed or vice versa, and every single one of those would need to be reverse engineered in a Python 3 environment. Not a job I would want to do: like Barry, I would rewrite from scratch (and probably redesign as well). But every part converted would be a joy to work with in the future. > As best I can determine, the task of updating it to be Python 3 > compatible has now been under way for ten years (with most of that > time, only one person working on it). But that's because Python 3 deliberately encouraged decoding streams of bytes, by making it hard to process bytes the same way as str in Python 2. It wouldn't have been hard to make the bytes type identical to str except for the internal representation, so that programs like Twisted and Mercurial would just need to be converted so that *everything* was bytes except for the error messages. But that was deliberately avoided: a lot of (Python 2) str methods were not inherited by bytes. (In fact, some were re-added later, but too late to make the bit-shovelers happy.) So the Twisted people hated Python 3 with a passion. I'm not surprised that only one person would work on the port, I'm surprised they found even one! Steve ------------------------------------------------------ Mailman-Users mailing list Mailman-Users@python.org https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/mailman-users Mailman FAQ: http://wiki.list.org/x/AgA3 Security Policy: http://wiki.list.org/x/QIA9 Searchable Archives: http://www.mail-archive.com/mailman-users%40python.org/ Unsubscribe: https://mail.python.org/mailman/options/mailman-users/archive%40jab.org
