[Sugar-devel] [GSoC] Porting To Python3

[Daniel Narvaez]

Obsoleting the gtk2 was an explicit decision. It's not that we don't care
but we just don't have enough resources to maintain two toolkits.

Completely breaking the API is really bad. It takes years for the
applications to switch and many of them never do it. We have seen it with
activities (and documentation) but, for example, it happened to the gtk
toolkit itself, with major applications which have not been ported yet.

In the gtk2->gtk3 case I think we was pretty much forced to break. The
difference between the two GNOME stacks was too large, some gtk2 pieces was
supposed to go away from distributions (I'm not sure if they did in
practice), and introspection was a major advantage for our platform.

Here we don't seem to be in the same situation. I'd expect the differences
for the toolkit code to *not* be huge. The python2 ecosystem seems to be
still very much alive. And I don't see the port improving our platform much.

It's not a clear cut decision of course, but my feeling is that a complete
API break would hurt more than it helps at this time.

I should mention that supporting both python2 and python3 in
sugar-toolkit-gtk3 won't come for free either because new code will have to
be compatible with both. We can probably ensure that with unit tests, but
it's a cost to consider. We could also allow new API to be python3 only and
plan for a sugar4 toolkit with gtk4 (whenever that gets released).

Seeing the diff of a quick and dirty port would help a lot to evaluate
things here.


On 6 May 2014 08:00, Sam Parkinson <sam.parkinson3 at gmail.com> wrote:

>
> On May 6, 2014 9:47 AM, "Daniel Narvaez" <dwnarvaez at gmail.com> wrote:
> >
> > On 1 May 2014 14:42, kunal arora <kunalarora.135 at gmail.com> wrote:
> >>
> >> 4)Create a new Sugar-toolkit-gtk3-python3 from the old one and also
> keep the Sugar-toolkit-gtk3 for activities that haven't yet ported to
> Python3 and slowly deprecate it with time as more and more activities shift
> to Python3.
> >
> >
> > This sounds like a maintenance nightmare. Can we make sugar-toolkit-gtk3
> work with both python2 and python3 instead?
>
> Why would we need to maintain a py2 version; we don't maintain the gtk2
> toolkit or even care to put it on GitHub.
>



-- 
Daniel Narvaez
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