[Sugar-devel] [GSoC] Porting To Python3

[Walter Bender]

On Tue, May 6, 2014 at 5:57 AM, Peter Robinson <pbrobinson at gmail.com> wrote:

> On Tue, May 6, 2014 at 10:00 AM, Daniel Narvaez <dwnarvaez at gmail.com>
> wrote:
> > 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.
>
> There were a number of reasons and the development of features that
> were needed/wanted at the time was happening in the gtk3 and dependent
> libraries space, there was also things like introspection that could
> only really come to gst1 and various other advantages (I seem to
> remember there's a doc in the wiki somewhere).
>
> It's taken time but there's the ability to remove most of gtk2/gst0.10
> and other bits now in Fedora 20 with gnome3. We could do most of that
> too with sugar if the one or two core Activities make the jump (Record
> and TurtleBlocks I'm looking at you!) and it would reduce our image
> size quite a bit.
>

Anyone volunteer to help me with the gst0.10 -> gst1.0 conversion? That is
why I have not been able to port Turtle (or Measure). I need access to the
raw data.


>
> > 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.
>
> Fedora and I believe a number of other distributions are now planning
> the jump to python3 as the default python in the core distro in
> upcoming releases. It's taken a while to pick up steam but it's
> certainly something that will happen before long. Obviously 2.x will
> be around for time to come but it's adding extra deps.
>
> > 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.
>
> My understanding was that 2.7 was designed to ease the jump to python3
> and in recent releases there's been some features added to ensure it's
> more the case now so maybe it should be something that we ensure that
> the 2.7 guidelines that are designed for transition to 3 are enforced
> to ensure less work later.
>
> > 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).
>
> It's in planning, see the recent Gnome designer gathering in Berlin
> from last week.
>
> > 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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> > http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/sugar-devel
> >
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-- 
Walter Bender
Sugar Labs
http://www.sugarlabs.org
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