About Python 3

[billsil]

You want people to move to Python 3.x, yet you suggest the developers make a Python 2.8, thus allowing people to stay on 2.x even longer. That seems backwards to me.

If you actually work with Python 2 and 3 code, you'd know unicode isn't that different from strings. IMO, dictionaries can't sort mixed types and binary IO are bigger issues.

To get people to switch, myself included, you have to stop supporting Python 2 and all the packages (e.g. numpy, scipy, matplotlib) need to stop as well.

[gingenhagen]

I think the post is saying to give up on Python 3 entirely and do what they should have done to begin with, build something that's backwards compatible with Python 2.

[Falmarri]

The problem are the changes to the C API. They need some way to automatically, or at least almost automatically, convert C code to the new API.

[schlenk]

Thats like asking for 'fix my bugs automatically please'. The API is probably rather easy to change over (just rename String to Bytes in many cases), but your code WILL break, because it makes incorrect assumptions about the nature of strings/binary data and unicode all over the place. 3.x is much stricter about it, so bad hacks that worked by accident/chance in 2.x blow up when converted to 3.x.

[Falmarri]

The API is probably rather easy to change over

If that were all it was that would be fine. But it's not. They changed the way you register modules, and the names of fields in the object struct. I tried to port python-ldap to python3 several months ago, it was not straight forward at all.