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Did you read the article? The long tail is the critical collection of libraries and most of them will never be ported. People write new Python 2 libraries every day, actually--the list is getting longer, not shorter. That said, gevent is an extremely critical library for a lot of production Python 2 code. There doesn't even seem to be a roadmap to port it to Python 3.

discuss

illumen|11 years ago

gevent is ported to python 3. I guess a proper release would be soon. See here: https://github.com/surfly/gevent/issues/38

If the libraries are used by people, they tend to get ported. Like most of the most popular packages, and 4799 packages listed on pypi.

Any others you depend on? I'm prepared to roll up my sleeves and help.

YokoZar|11 years ago

If you genuinely want to help, I suggest porting launchpadlib to Python3: https://bugs.launchpad.net/launchpadlib/+bug/1060734

This is affecting other parts of Ubuntu, as we don't always install python2 anymore after porting all the default apps to python3. The lack of python3 launchpadlib means apport (the automatic bug reporting tool) doesn't work on some installations.

edit: porting launchpadlib requires first porting lazr.restfulclient, which might be genuinely challenging: https://bugs.launchpad.net/lazr.restfulclient/+bug/1000801

toma7|11 years ago

Let's assume a modestly sized Python program uses 8 libraries or so. Assuming 80% of libraries are ported, that means 20% aren't. The likelihood of at least one of your 8 libraries not being ported is 1 - (0.8)^8 = 83%. In other words, most people will find that at least one of their cricitcal libraries is not ported. That is certainly the case for me (Bloomberg Python API, for 2.7, and which, btw, only came out 6 months ago). Inevitably the people using Python come from specific domains, and use at least one domain specific library, so while all the common "usual suspect" libraries are ported, there is usually a very high chance that one critical library is not.

Perhaps the way the entire question should be thought of is: are there actually many properly useful Python 3 libraries that are not available in Python 2?? I bet the above equation would look much better when inverted.