[Debian-med-packaging] Bug#707341: Q: Python 2 vs Python 3 and wxgtk2.8 vs wxgtk3.0

[Olly Betts]

On Mon, Jul 07, 2014 at 10:47:28PM +0200, Karsten Hilbert wrote:
> What's the current Debian position ?

Note that the debian-python team don't maintain packages of wxPython, so
they really aren't the people to ask.

For wx3, wxPython will be a separate source package to the C++ library
(python-wxgtk2.8 is built from the wxwidgets2.8 source package), so they
could take over maintenance if they wanted, but that's really a separate
discussion.

With my debian wx team hat on, I really can't see a python3-wxgtk2.8
package happening (upstream no longer work on the 2.8 branch, and in
debian we're intending to do the bare minimum to wxwidgets2.8 until we
can RM it).  It would need someone to step forward and adapt upstream
wxPython to work with python3, and then update the packaging
accordingly, only to have all that work thrown away before jessie is
released.  If there was someone wanting to work on adapting the upstream
code, it would make much more sense to work on wxPython 3.0 instead of
2.8.

> From an upstream point of view it would be much preferrable to
> have available a python3-wxgtk2.8 because that would not
> force us to port to BOTH Python 3 AND wxPython 3 at the same
> time.

Once python-wxgtk3.0 is packaged (should be uploaded very soon), you
could port to that without having to switch to python3.  And in fact
you'll have to wait until wxpython upstream support python3 to do that
latter anyway.  I don't have much idea what their timescale for this
is though - it seems they're addressing python3 support via their
"phoenix" reimplementation, and I haven't seen an indication of when
that will get a stable release:

http://wiki.wxpython.org/ProjectPhoenix/ProjectGoals

So in summary, not really good news I'm afraid - if your package uses
wxpython and something else which is dropping python2 support you're
probably not going to be in for a fun time.  Unfortunately, I don't
think there's an easy solution to this.

Cheers,
    Olly