[vtkusers] Status of VTK Python 3 wrapper support

[Matthew Brett]

Hi,

On Thu, Aug 7, 2014 at 6:20 AM, Berk Geveci <berk.geveci at kitware.com> wrote:
> Ondrej's blog is pretty scary :-)
>
> It re-emphasizes my thought that this is not a step to be taken lightly. It
> will take time to get a code base working on both 2.x and 3.x and we need to
> do it while continuing to support 2.x well. We also need to figure out what
> the minimum x in 2.x is. It sounds like it should be at least 6 but possibly
> 7 or higher.

The big headache in porting is the unicode / bytes issue, because it
involves thinking rather hard about whether a particular stream should
be strings or bytes - but if there's not much of that, the porting
work is usually pretty light.  I can certainly help if you let me know
how, I've done the port for a couple of code-bases.

Python 2.6 is fine, but you might want to support only Python 3.3 or
later, because this allows you to use

b'my bytes'  # Python 3, available in Python >= 2.6
u'my string'  # Python 2, available in Python >=3.3

in Python 2 and Python 3, and that turns out to be very convenient.

Cheers,

Matthew