Re: GNOME goal for 3.8: Python 3 -- impact for pygobject itself

[Martin Pitt <martin pitt ubuntu com>]

Hello all,

Olav Vitters [2012-11-05 10:05 +0100]:
> In the last release team meeting we've accepted the Python 3 porting
> goal for GNOME 3.8.
> https://live.gnome.org/GnomeGoals/Python3Porting
> 
> Meaning: During development phase of GNOME 3.8 (3.7.x) we will depend on
> Python 3.

*applauds*

I wonder what the impact of that should be on pygobject itself.
pygobject currently supports python 2.6, 2.7, 3.2, and 3.3, but if you
don't specify anything it will default to "python", i. e. 2.x. You can
build it differently with e. g.

  ./configure PYTHON=python3

(or "PYTHON=python3.2", etc.), and even install multiple versions in
parallel.

My ~/.jhbuildrc has had this for a while:

  module_extra_env['pygobject'] = { 'PYTHON': 'python3' }

but if we now want to port GNOME to py3, I guess this should be
rearranged.

Should I just change the default to "python3", so that jhbuild will
from now on build for py3 unless you explicitly configure for python2?
That would go along with that goal, but would break modules which
expect pygobject for py2.

Or should we hack the build system to build for both 2 and 3 at the
same time? This would involve tearing apart some chicken in the
autotools setup, and no other Python module does it that way, but it
might help with the transition?

Thanks,

Martin

-- 
Martin Pitt                        | http://www.piware.de
Ubuntu Developer (www.ubuntu.com)  | Debian Developer  (www.debian.org)