[bitbake-devel] Python 3 for Bitbake

[Christopher Larson]

On Wed, May 4, 2016 at 8:56 AM, Richard Purdie <
richard.purdie at linuxfoundation.org> wrote:

> We've come to a cross roads for bitbake and python. Currently we run on
> python 2.7 but python 2.x is getting old and we really need to move to
> 3.X.
>
> Whilst there are a number of tools out there which can translate
> between the two, we have the complexity that we have python both in
> bitbake itself and spread throughout the metadata. We could try and
> migrate, attempting to support both versions but it would require a lot
> of effort and I'm not sure we get much return for it. Its more likely
> we'd end up with a lot of subtle bugs.
>
> An alternative is we just have a flag day and switch, putting in
> patches to bitbake and the metadata to migrate to 3.X in one go. The
> advantage of this is much cleaner code without any workarounds for
> compatibility.
>
> I did some work on this a couple of years ago, I've dusted off those
> patches and improved upon them to get to the ones in:
>
> http://git.yoctoproject.org/cgit.cgi/poky-contrib/log/?h=rpurdie/wip
>
> Right now, this is enough to be able to run "bitbake bash", there are a
> ton of things which still need to be done. The patches above are rather
> rough, the aim just being to find out if we can get the basics working
> which it appears we can.
>
> My proposal is we decide to have the flag day, we queue up the patches
> on a python3 branch both in oe-core and bitbake, then we switch when we
> get successful autobuilder builds. I'd ideally like to do this quite
> soon and get one with it (within a few weeks), leaving plenty of time
> to handle issues and the other changes planned for this release cycle
> and give other layers time to adapt.
>
> I will likely push things so the basics in the core work, I'll then
> need help for things like toaster, the QA framework, the supporting
> tools (devtool, recipetool and so on).
>
> Does anyone object to this?


I fully support this effort, and the use of a flag day to switch and not
maintain compatibility. We've wanted to move to 3 for a long time, after
all.
-- 
Christopher Larson
clarson at kergoth dot com
Founder - BitBake, OpenEmbedded, OpenZaurus
Maintainer - Tslib
Senior Software Engineer, Mentor Graphics
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