supporting python2 and python3 in kdevelop

[Milian Wolff]

On Tuesday 05 November 2013 01:23:41 Sven Brauch wrote:
> On Tuesday 05 November 2013 00:50:11 Milian Wolff wrote:
> > It's just more work. (stable + master) x 2, i.e. twice the work ;-)
> 
> Well, if I compare the at most maybe 6 or 8 more releases I will do for
> python2 to the amount of work it would be to merge this into one repository
> in a way it actually works, and then *unmerging* it again in three years, I
> will happily choose creating the tarballs ;)
> Not even talking about the maintenance burden having it in one repo would
> involve.
> If I use separate branches, I can just maintain py2 as a legacy option and
> drop it any time I want without effort. I can also at any time kind of
> feature-freeze py2 and just backport necessary fixes, which will hopefully
> limit the amount of releases to one per kdevelop cycle. [1]
> 
> > If you can merge changes, then you could also reuse code, no?
> 
> Yes, of course most of the code is the same. But still -- python 3 is
> different from python 2 in so many places. It has different semantics, a
> different way to retrieve string data from the parser, different (not just
> more! different) AST classes and thus a different AST visitor...
> It's not like you could just disable some features in python 2 mode.
> 
> Especially the different visitor pattern will imo make it very painful to
> use the same source code for e.g. the declaration builder in both versions.
> I will end up having different versions of AST nodes, e.g. function
> arguments -- there would be a Python2ArgumentsAst and a Python3ArgumentsAst
> (with quite disjoint properties) and depending on which is populated the
> AstDefaultVisitor, the DeclarationBuilder, the ContextBuilder and the
> ExpressionVisitor would need to behave differently. And you know the code,
> it's not the cleanest code ever written -- littering it with if(python3)'s
> every two lines would kill it imo.
> 
> Plus re-using any code will always come at the cost of having the fork in
> the py3 repo, which I don't want.

As I said, the removal of the upstream code from the repo is certainly nice 
for packagers. Furthermore, you are the maintainer, and thus have the last say 
in this regard. Please, feel free to continue with the two (four) branches.

<snip>

> [1] I'm coming from kde-telepathy, there we have like 17 (no exaggeration)
> repos which need to be released each time, so compared to that 2 sounds fine
> ;)
> Looking at it like this, kdev-php and kdev-php-docs is the same burden like
> py2 and py3.

True, which is also why I want to merge the two repos since ever :)

-- 
Milian Wolff
mail at milianw.de
http://milianw.de