[Sugar-devel] GSoC 2014 - Porting the Sugar core onto Python 3.x info

[Ravi Kumar]

Hello everyone,
I'm Ravi Kumar, an undergrad Computer Science and Engineering student based
in Bangalore. I'm familiar with Source code management with git and
proficient with Python, Ruby and C, although I haven't made any real
contributions to open-source projects. So this is all the more exciting to
me. I see GSoC as a very good opportunity to learn and also be a part of
and give something back to a community.


I went through the Ideas page and was interested in porting the sugar core
onto Python 3.x and I had a bunch of questions.

1. Are there any constraints the community places on the strategy that is
to be
    adopted to port the code or  are the strategies up to the person
submitting the
    proposal?
2. How reliable and thorough are the unit tests that are in place?


Here's what I've thought through so far.
Maintaining a code base in python 2 or in python 3 and then using 2to3 or
3to2 to give out releases is going to be problematic. Say someone files a
bug against the Python 3.x version and the code for it was generated using
2to3, there wouldn't be a very good way to fix this.

So my initial strategy is to strengthen the unit tests, make them
compatible across 2.6-3.3, automate testing with python 2.6 and 3.3
simultaneously with Tox or a similar tool, and then incrementally write
polyglot using the six package and other methods to pass more and more unit
tests until the whole of the codebase supports Python 2.6 through to 3.3.
Then, improve and update the documentation so that the codebase is easy to
maintain in the future.

Thanks,
Ravi Kumar
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