The key thing in my mind is that you can't make a change that breaks 100% of libraries at one time without fracturing the community or at least introducing a major hindrance to upgrade that will mean maintaining 2.x series for a very long time. Even if the upgrade process is as easy as a recompile, there are a lot of published libraries no longer maintained. Even for the ones that are maintained, there are people who might not want to be forced to upgrade every library. I'm not a Grails user, but my impression is that the framework relies on a lot of plugins and is one of the (if not the most) active Groovy communities and I have a hard time envisioning how that upgrade path will take. You'd have to maintain Groovy 2 and Groovy 3 versions of each plugin, and to upgrade you'd have to upgrade everything at one time to the (most likely) latest version.
What is the possibility that the package names are changed, the parser, metaprogramming model, etc. that all break in Groovy 3 change, but yet still have a compatibility JAR implementing the minimal Groovy 2.x classes in a way that allows interoperability with Groovy 3 code? Theoretically at a worst case, Groovy 3 should be able to view Groovy 2 classes the same way as any other Java class. I think many concerns would be lifted if Groovy 2 and 3 could co-exist at the same time, allowing you to upgrade incrementally. Jason -----Original Message----- From: Russel Winder [mailto:rus...@winder.org.uk] Sent: Monday, March 27, 2017 1:29 PM To: users@groovy.apache.org Subject: Re: Maven coordinates going forward On Mon, 2017-03-27 at 12:47 -0400, Gerald Wiltse wrote: > […] > Specifically, reaching out to the Python maintainers for guidance. In > hindsight, someone deeply involved usually has a very clear vision of > "What we should have done instead was...". It would be a major missed > opportunity if nobody pursues that avenue. > […] I cannot speak for the core developers, but I am sure I could ask them via the various Python mailing lists. The introduction of Python 3 was not handled well in my view from the social and management perspective and this led to a majority of the tribalism issues that were seen. The changes to the data model were large, and needed, and affected library writers more than end users. The biggest change that affected end users was the shift from ASCII to Unicode as the representation of strings. This broke any code using strings for networking. Not having packages such as future and six, and tools such as 2to3 properly in place before the mass push to Python 3 was a bit of a problem. However the single biggest problem was that many influential people said "Python 3, no way" from the outset. Also a couple of high profile projects said "the issue of strings is too big, we will not change". A well-thought of Python distribution refused to accept the existence of Python 3, and out of that that distribution is now dead and Anaconda/Miniconda from Continuum Analytics is now the default distribution for people not use an OS with packaging – or actually sometimes anyway. Also a few Linux distributions based on mass use of Python are based on code that is at least a decade old (Scientific Linux, I am looking at you). All of this led to a Python 2 vs Python 3 warfare that was almost totally nothing to do with technicalities. It was to do with vested interests and financial muscle. It became tribal almost like the Green/Purple Drazi in "Geometry of Shadows" an episode of Babylon 5 htt ps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AcBTOU7RvbU . It has taken a long time for Python 3 to become ascendant but ascendant it is. The old "stick with Python 2" project have quietly enabled Python 3 and tried to avoid any publicity about this. So the change was a technical success and a management and social failure. Thus changing the package names is a management problem not a technical problem. So the only real question is how to enable redirection at dynamic link time. -- Russel. ============================================================================= Dr Russel Winder t: +44 20 7585 2200 voip: sip:russel.win...@ekiga.net 41 Buckmaster Road m: +44 7770 465 077 xmpp: rus...@winder.org.uk London SW11 1EN, UK w: www.russel.org.uk skype: russel_winder This email message and any attachments are for the sole use of the intended recipient(s). Any unauthorized review, use, disclosure or distribution is prohibited. If you are not the intended recipient, please contact the sender by reply email and destroy all copies of the original message and any attachments.
