[Bf-committers] Moving to Python 3.2.x

[Campbell Barton]

On Wed, Mar 9, 2011 at 4:15 AM, Martin Poirier <theeth at yahoo.com> wrote:
>
>
> --- On Tue, 3/8/11, Campbell Barton <ideasman42 at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> As said before in the last mail, its fairly arbitrary when
>> we upgrade.
>> But I'd really not want to have to worry about maintaining
>> 2 versions
>> of python for more then a months, two months at most.
>
> You're saying that like we HAD to support Py 3.2. We didn't. We could just have kept on only supporting 3.1 for months.
>
>> Heres my proposed policy for major upgrades...
>>  http://wiki.blender.org/index.php/Dev:2.5/Source/Python/API/Py3.1_Migration#Python_Upgrade_Policy
>>
>> --- copying main points from the wiki.
>> * Linux platform maintainers first agree to drop support.
>
> All platform maintainers should be involved.
>
>> * Include a note in meeting minutes beforehand that the
>> python version will be no longer supported.
>
> Should be separate from minutes, it's an important subject that warrants its own thread.
>
>> * Ensure build instructions are up to data for
>> Ubuntu/Fedora to install packages (most likely from testing repo's).
>
> Sounds good, but there's nothing in there as to HOW to decide when to upgrade. It's a list of things to do after the decision has been taken (which, ok, is nice, but is not the main issue here). The fact that someone can flip a switch and have everything work with a newer version is not a solid reason to upgrade such a dependency.
>
> Martin

Made suggested changes:
http://wiki.blender.org/index.php/Dev:2.5/Source/Python/API/Py3.1_Migration#Python_Upgrade_Policy

Regarding not-upgrading.
Ye don't _have_ to upgrade at all, for core language stuff its pretty
stable and not changing much between releases so can see your point.

But since we distribute all the libraries too, these get a lot of
improvements & fixes each release, I'd argue that its worth upgrading
and not waiting say - 6months for this reason alone.
see: http://docs.python.org/py3k/whatsnew/3.2.html

Unless some unusual problem with the new python comes up, I'd like to
upgrade once they do a stable release & blender platform maintainers
are ok to go ahead.