Django and Python 3 (Take 2)

About 18 months ago I blogged about Django and Python 3, I gave the official roadmap. Not a lot has changed since then unfortunately, we’ve dropped 2.3 entirely, 2.4 is on it’s way out, but there’s no 3.X support in core. One fun thing has changed though: I get to help set the roadmap, which is a) cool, b) means the fact that I care about Python 3 counts for something. I’m not going to get into “Why Py3k”, because that’s been done to death, but it’s a better language, that I’d rather program in, so the only question is how do we get there.

I posted a while ago on Hacker News that I foresaw Python 3 support by the end of this summer. I still think that’s reasonable, but there’s a tiny unspoken question there: how do we go from 0 to there. I have an answer! Drum roll please… it turns out, as a student, I tend to have a lot of free time over the summer, and Google has this lovely thing called Google Summer of Code, where they give students money to work on open source. So I’d like to make Python 3 support for Django a GSOC project this summer. With myself either mentoring or student-ing. I don’t care which role I take, just that someone who’s committed to the project takes it on. I think this task is eminently reasonable for the timeline, especially in light of the work done by Martin von LÃ¶wis which, even though it probably doesn’t apply, lays a lot of the ground work and identifies a lot of the key issues (and features a lot of utilities which will probably be of use).

All that being said any statements here or elsewhere (especially one involving timelines) reflects my personal goals and beliefs, not necessarily any other Django core developers, and certainly not an official project position.