Re: [PATCH v3 2/8] git_remote_helpers: fix input when running under Python 3

From: Sverre Rabbelier <srabbelier@gmail.com>
Date: Jan 23, 2013, 19:20 UTC
Message-ID: <CAGdFq_jp3BrS0zgDpmiXGduwu_m4E2CCL+X32P-7T=z9Qk-wuQ@mail.gmail.com>
In-Reply-To: <7cd489e5b1b2578b1509232196cd6b21fd684843.1358686905.git.john@keeping.me.uk>

On Sun, Jan 20, 2013 at 5:15 AM, John Keeping <john@keeping.me.uk> wrote:

Show 14 quoted lines

> Although 2to3 will fix most issues in Python 2 code to make it run under
> Python 3, it does not handle the new strict separation between byte
> strings and unicode strings.  There is one instance in
> git_remote_helpers where we are caught by this, which is when reading
> refs from "git for-each-ref".
>
> Fix this by operating on the returned string as a byte string rather
> than a unicode string.  As this method is currently only used internally
> by the class this does not affect code anywhere else.
>
> Note that we cannot use byte strings in the source as the 'b' prefix is
> not supported before Python 2.7 so in order to maintain compatibility
> with the maximum range of Python versions we use an explicit call to
> encode().

The three patches that deal with .encode() stuff (2, 7, 8) make me a bit uncomfortable, as they add some significant complexity to our python code. Is this the recommended way to deal with this (similar to the other patch where you linked to the python wiki explaining)?

As one datapoint, it seems that it's actually Python 2.6 that introduces the b prefix.

http://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-3112/

When did we last revisit what minimal python version we are ok with requiring?

-- Cheers,

Sverre Rabbelier