[PyOpenGL-Devel] Porting to python 3

[Rob R. <r.r...@sc...>]

Hi,

I'd like to help porting pyopengl to Python 3. 

I noticed there is already a Python 3 branch on launchpad made mainly using the 2to3 tool. However, I can imagine that this branch cannot be merged with the main branch since that would make pyopengl incompatible with Python 2. My suggested approach would be to use the 'use_2to3' flag of setuptools to make the source tree compatible with both python 2 and 3 as discussed here: http://packages.python.org/distribute/python3.html . The basic idea is that the 2to3 conversion (possibly with custom fixers) is done at build/install time.

As I understood from a colleague of mine (Almar Klein) who had discussed porting to Py3 with Mike Fletcher a while ago, one of the issues was that the 'testsuite' that was used for testing PyOpenGl is also written in Py2 and thus needs porting before rigorous testing could be performed. With the proposed approach, the source code can still be tested under Py2 with the existing test suite. Until a proper Py3 test suite comes available, Py3 support could be denominated as 'untested'. The toolkit that we will be using PyOpenGl for (visvis, http://code.google.com/p/visvis/) will be ported by us and will as such be a basic test for PyOpenGL under Py3

I'd like to have suggestions on how to proceed in such a way that my efforts can eventually be taken into the main branch, such that the time spent by us (Sience Applied) will eventually be of benefit to all PyOpenGL users.

Regards,

Rob

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Rob Reilink, M.Sc
Science Applied
www.science-applied.nl
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