Re: [Qemu-devel] [PATCH v4 1/2] qapi: Open files with encoding='utf-8'

[Eduardo Habkost]

On Tue, Jun 19, 2018 at 01:05:10PM +0100, Daniel P. Berrangé wrote:
[...]
> > > > The python-future package would help us write code for a single
> > > > file/string API instead of two different APIs, but it's not a
> > > > QEMU build dependency (yet?), so this patch is good enough for
> > > > now.
> > > 
> > > Please do not invest more than absolutely necessary in Python 2 support.
> > > All such investment will turn into technical debt in less than two
> > > years.  If you must invest, pick a solution that will result in less
> > > technical debt.  We can accept local ugliness for that.
> > > 
> > > In my personal opinion, dumb ideas like supporting Python 2 this close
> > > to its EOL ought to look ugly.
> > 
> > That's the whole point: python-future allows us to not worry
> > about Python 2 support in the code anymore because it exposes the
> > Python 3 string API (and others) even if we're running Python 2.
> > 
> > After we stop supporting Python 2, we can simply delete the "from
> > __future__ import .*" and "from builtins import .*" lines.
> > 
> > Anyway, I will send a RFC series demonstrating that, and then we
> > can discuss if it's worth it.  My main worry is not the extra
> > imports in Python code, but the introduction of a new build
> > dependency only for a few (one?) releases.
> 
> Using __future__ doesn't add an build dependancy AFAIK. __future__ is
> bundled with core python library rather than being an addon module.

The extra dependency is because of the "builtins" module,
provided by python-future in Python 2.7.

-- 
Eduardo