Mercurial on Python 3000 status report (GSoC)

[Antoine Pitrou]

Hi,

> It is somewhat unknown the kind of support Python 3.0 will receive
> from the Python folks, but it seems that they won't release a 3.0.2
> version (3.0.1 is on it's way). So we are going directly to 3.1.

As announced on python-list (*), the 3.0 branch is closed. 3.0 was not as
polished as we would have hoped it to be (especially the I/O subsystem, which I
suppose is quite important to Mercurial :-)), so everyone planning to write code
for 3.x should target the 3.1 release and upper.

(*) http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-list/2009-July/718561.html

Personnally, I'm very glad you're making progress on this, and looking forward
to have a 3.x-compatible Mercurial!

> So far the main issue is the Unicode/bytes explicit conversion
> that Py3k requires when reading and writing files (or a process output
> in the case of the test suite).

I assume most uses of files and strings in Mercurial require using bytes and
binary files, so no conversion should actually happen. The exception being UI
messages, and user-editable files like hgignore, hgrc.
(but I have no knowledge of the Mercurial internals so I may be wrong)

Regards

Antoine.