Re: [RFC/PATCH] CodingGuidelines: add Python code guidelines

From: John Keeping <john@keeping.me.uk>
Date: Jan 18, 2013, 22:05 UTC
Message-ID: <20130118220552.GF31172@serenity.lan>
In-Reply-To: <7vip6uqlvl.fsf@alter.siamese.dyndns.org>

On Fri, Jan 18, 2013 at 12:25:34PM -0800, Junio C Hamano wrote:

Show 16 quoted lines

> John Keeping <john@keeping.me.uk> writes:
>> As more people have started trying to support Python 3 in the wild, it
>> has become clear that it is often easier to have a single codebase that
>> works with both Python 2 and Python 3, and not use 2to3.
>>
>> It is for this reason that the Unicode literal prefix was reintroduced.
> 
> Yes, and from that perspective, placing floor on earlier 3.x makes
> tons of sense, no?
> 
> These early versions may not be unstable in the "this does not
> behave as specified in the language specification for 3.x" sense,
> but for the purpose of running scripts meant to be executable by
> both 2.x and 3.x series, the early 3.x versions are not as good as
> later versions where Python folks started making deliberate effort
> to support them.

As far as I'm aware (and having reviewed the release notes for 3.1, 3.2 and 3.3 as well as the planned features for 3.4), Unicode literals are the only feature to have been added that was intended to make it easier to support Python 2 and 3 in the same codebase.

Given that no code currently on pu uses Unicode literals, I don't see a reason to specify a minimum version of Python 3 since we're already restricting ourselves to features in 2.6.

John