Thomas: thanks for creating this patch.

We need to work with upstream as far as possible when packaging softwware in Fedora (see http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/PackageMaintainers/WhyUpstream ).  With that in mind:
  - what are upstream's plans (if any) for Python 3 support? Is 2to3 going to be their way of handling python3 support, or are they thinking of doing a separate branch (or have they not thought of it yet...)
  - do what extent have you tested the code coming out of 2to3 and verified that it works? (I notice that the pyxdg tarball has a "tests" subdirectory that doesn't seem to get used in the existing builds, perhaps they could be used to verify that the generated python 3 code works?)

I'd suggest that if the test code still works after going through 2to3 that you should post that information on the upstream mailing list (which appears to be http://lists.freedesktop.org/mailman/listinfo/xdg ; there's also an email address in the AUTHORS file in the tarball), as it seems like an important data point, and to see if they'd be happy with us shipping this subpackage.

Hope this is helpful

Hi Dave,

I just emailed the author of pyxdg to ask for his plans.

The "tests" subdirectory are tests, which are used by upstream itself. E.g. one test reads the gedit.desktop file, modifies it a bit and places it in the current working directory.

I tried to run the tests with this result:

Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "test-desktop-write.py", line 7, in <module>
    test.parse("/usr/share/applications/gedit.desktop")
  File "/usr/lib/python3.1/site-packages/xdg/DesktopEntry.py", line 33, in parse
    IniFile.parse(self, file, ["Desktop Entry", "KDE Desktop Entry"])
  File "/usr/lib/python3.1/site-packages/xdg/IniFile.py", line 33, in parse
    fd = file(filename, 'r')
NameError: global name 'file' is not defined

When I have an answer from upstream, I'll look into this.


Thanks for pointing me to that.

I'm holding on this, waiting for Thomas to let me know what upstream said.

(In reply to comment #3)
> I'm holding on this, waiting for Thomas to let me know what upstream said.    

Sorry, the mail was out on 2010-02-03 16:12 UTC and nothing heard till now.
Right now, I resend a mail, just in case I hit his spam-box.

I didn't want to subscibe to the mailinglist from comment 1, so I emailed the upstream author directly.

I got an answer from upstream:

The author currently has not much time to work on python3 support, but this is now on his todo list. When he looks into this, he'll say hi again...

This bug appears to have been reported against 'rawhide' during the Fedora 13 development cycle.
Changing version to '13'.

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Can you please update pyxdg ? The 0.23 release is out and pyxdg support python3 since 0.20. I'm currently porting gnome-clocks to python 3 (it's a gnome goal) and it would greatly help to have a python 3 release available (backport to fedora 17 if possible) !

pyxdg-0.23-1.fc17 has been submitted as an update for Fedora 17.
https://admin.fedoraproject.org/updates/pyxdg-0.23-1.fc17

pyxdg-0.23-1.fc18 has been submitted as an update for Fedora 18.
https://admin.fedoraproject.org/updates/pyxdg-0.23-1.fc18

Thanks; I've added it to the table in https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Python3#Python_3_already_in_Fedora

Package pyxdg-0.23-1.fc18:
* should fix your issue,
* was pushed to the Fedora 18 testing repository,
* should be available at your local mirror within two days.
Update it with:
# su -c 'yum update --enablerepo=updates-testing pyxdg-0.23-1.fc18'
as soon as you are able to.
Please go to the following url:
https://admin.fedoraproject.org/updates/FEDORA-2012-15682/pyxdg-0.23-1.fc18
then log in and leave karma (feedback).

Perhaps it would be better to call the new subpackage 'python3-xdg' instead of 'python3-pyxdg'?

I can see two advantages with this naming:

 a) Our packaging guidelines suggest to use the name that's used from within Python code: "This makes a package name format of python-$NAME. When in doubt, use the name of the module that you type to import it in a script." [1] And indeed, this name is "xdg", as in "import xdg".

 b) This would be closer to Debian naming where the (python2 compatible) binary package is called 'python-xdg' [2].

[1] http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Packaging:NamingGuidelines#Addon_Packages_.28python_modules.29
[2] http://packages.debian.org/sid/python-xdg

pyxdg-0.23-1.fc17 has been pushed to the Fedora 17 stable repository.  If problems still persist, please make note of it in this bug report.