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

From: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>
Date: Jan 18, 2013, 22:26 UTC
Message-ID: <7vwqvap1q9.fsf@alter.siamese.dyndns.org>
In-Reply-To: <20130118220552.GF31172@serenity.lan>

John Keeping <john@keeping.me.uk> writes:

Show 22 quoted lines

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

So there may be some other incompatibility lurking that we may run into later?

> 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.

OK, at least that reasoning need to be kept somewhere, either in the documentation of in the log message.

Thanks.