Python3 was released more than a year ago so far, and the release candidates and beta releases much before then.How successful has the transition been to python3 so far?One way to measure that is to look at how many python packages have been ported to py3k. One way to measure what packages are released is to look at the python package index(aka cheeseshop, aka pypi) Not all packages ported to python3 are listed on pypi, and not all packages are listed on pypi. Also there are many packages which haven't been updated in a long time. However it is still a pretty good way to get a vague idea of how things are going.73 packages are listed in the python3 section of pypi, and 7568 packages in total. That's 0.96% of python packages having been ported to python3.Another large project index for python is the pygame.org website. Where there are currently over 2000 projects which use pygame. I think there are 2 projects ported to python3 on there(but I can't find them at the moment). This shows a section of the python community using it in projects. Most of the things listed on pypi are packages - not projects. It's showing what people are using for their projects - not what their libraries support. In a similar way, it could be good to see how many websites are running on top of python3. I think a lot of the people who have ported to python3 aren't really using it for their projects, but have done the porting work as a good will measure towards moving python forward.Another way to measure the success of the migration, is to pick a random sampling of some popular packages and see if their python3 support exists.Pygame(yes), Pyopengl(no), pyglet(no), numpy(no), PIL python imaging library(no), cherrypy(yes), Twisted(no), zope.interface(no), buildout(not sure, I think no), setuptools(no, patches available), django(no), plone(no), psyco(no), cython(yes), swig(yes), sqlalchemy(no).With some packages being used by 1000s or 10,000s of projects, those popular projects hold back the py3k migration significantly. It would seem that some applied efforts to the right projects would help the py3k migration a lot. Perhaps a py3k porting team could be made to help port important libraries to py3k.How about other python implementations supporting python3 features? None have full python3 support as of yet. For example jython(no), pypy(no), ironpython(no), tinypy(no), python-on-a-chip(no), unladenswallow(no), shedskin(no). However some implementations support some new python3 features.How about wsgi? wsgi is the python specification for web gateways... that it specifies how different web frameworks, web servers and applications can talk to each other and out to http. The wsgiref module in python3 is somewhat broken, and the amendments for python3 have not made it into a new wsgi spec. However work is being done towards it with a couple of major wsgi users supporting python3(cherrypy and mod_wsgi).Another question to ask is: 'are many projects planning to support py3k soon? Or have they decided not to work on py3k at all yet?'. It seems many projects have decided not to put in the work yet. At this point, for many projects they don't see enough benefit towards moving to py3k. Or their dependencies have not been ported, and they are waiting on those to be ported before beginning to port themselves.How well have the python developers themselves developed the support material for people upgrading their code? It looks like the cporting guide is still incomplete and hasn't been updated in a while. However the CPython API using projects have taken up the slack... so there are now a number of extensions for people to look at for guidance. It's possible to make CPython extensions which support both 2.x and 3.x APIs.There is now a 3to2 script being worked on. This allows projects to write their code in python3 code, and have it translated into python2 code. The python developers realised that having a 2to3 script was backwards in a way - requiring developers to stick with their python 2 code. However, many projects seem to not use the translation script, since it hasn't worked for them. Instead they seem to have either made separate branches, or made their code so that it works in both 2.x and 3.x.Support for python3 was dropped, and python3.1 is the new python3. However python3 still exists in some distributions (like ubuntu).So how are the various OS distributions going with their python3 support? The latest version of OSX to be released (snow leopard) uses a version of python2.6.1. Most unix distributions are using python2.6 as their main python at the moment. However most of them have also packaged python3.x as well. So it's fairly easy for people to try out python3 alongside their python2.x installation(s). macports currently has py25(286 ports), py26(206 ports), py30(0 ports... since py3.0 isn't supported by python.org), and py31(4 ports). So for macports, it has 1.9% of py31 packages ported compared to py25. This shows similar percentage to the ratio of ported packages in the pypi index(0.96%).This is not mirrored by the number of windows downloads from python.org. Python2.6.2 windows installer had 786400 downloads, python2.5.4(104291), python 3.1(241363) 3.1.1(214871) for a total of 456234 for 3.x. This is around 58% comparing 2.6 and (3.0+3.1). Strangely about the same amount of people are downloading 3.0 as 3.1 - even though it states that 3.1 is the new py3k and 3.0 is not supported anymore. This is just windows download counts for August... if you compare it to most unix distributions, they almost all come with python2.5 or python2.6.So, is the python3 migration going along swimmingly? Or has it failed to reach its goals(what were its goals if any)? What can we do to help? Should we even help at this point? comments