Re: [gentoo-dev] Stabilization of Python 3.1

[AllenJB <gentoo-lists@allenjb.me.uk>]

Dirkjan Ochtman wrote:
> On Sat, Sep 19, 2009 at 19:06, Alex Legler <a3li@gentoo.org> wrote:
>> What is the point of stabilizing it if users shouldn't use it as main
>> interpreter? Just leave it in ~arch until it can be safely used.
> 
> Making it easily available so that people can port stuff, so that the
> entire world may be able to use it as their main interpreter sooner?
> 
> Seriously, it's out there, there's no reason to keep it from stable.
> Just prevent people from making python invoke 3.x and everything will
> be fine.
> 
> Cheers,
> 
> Dirkjan
> 

Yes, there is a very good reason: The sanity of the users and those who
support them.

As a user who has spent a lot of time on IRC and the forums supporting
other users, I think I can safely say that stabilizing a version of
python which is not supported by portage will end up in a nightmare
scenario. At the very least portage, python-updater and eselect, if not
the majority of the commonly used tools (whichever of gentoolkit,
portage-utils, eix, etc use python), should support python 3.1 before it
goes stable.

Everything would be fine if all the users read news items, forums,
mailing lists and web pages - but they don't. It will get missed by many
many users - too many for something that breaks portage, in my opinion.

I would suggest the developers keep python 3.1 out of stable until it is
supported by portage, puthon-updater and eselect at minimum (ie. you can
easily revert to 2.6).


While writing this an alternative solution has occurred to me: Make sure
portage dependencies are correct so that python doesn't get dep-cleaned
(a brief check of the portage 2.1.6.7 ebuild makes it look like this
currently isn't the case - surely this should've been done as soon as it
was known portage didn't support python 3!) and perhaps add a block to
eselect so that python-3.1 can't be selected as the system python
interpreter until portage supports it.

AllenJB