Python compatibility

[Carl Sorensen]

On 1/15/19, 6:05 AM, "lilypond-devel on behalf of Knut Petersen" 
<address@hidden on behalf of address@hidden> wrote:

    
    @everybody: Does anybody volunteer to write a patch to allow python to be 
compatible with gcc 8? Probably it's easier to tell python's config to look for 
a gcc-7 (and maybe some other names) if the systems gcc is version 8.x (and to 
abort with a reasonable error message if no compatible compiler is 
    found).
    


I don't know how to write the patch that you've requested.

I've looked into python a little bit, and find that python 2.4.5 is more than 
10 years old; it's not even receiving new security updates.

It seems like it would be better to spend time updating our python code base to 
be compatible with either python 2.7.15 (released 2018-05-01) or python 3.7.2 
(released 2018-12-24).  I would expect python 3.7.2 to be compatible with gcc 
8.x.

I'm willing to take a stab at converting our python codebase.  I can't promise 
I'll succeed.  But in order to get started, I'd like to get answers to a couple 
of questions:

1) Why should I prefer 2.7.x over 3.7x (or vice versa)?  All of my python 
coding to this point has been in 2.x.  I suspect there would be lots more 
changes to go to 3.x.  So any opinions on which I should try?

2) How would I go about testing whether or not my code changes were successful? 
 Certainly it would appear that I would need to successfully pass make, make 
test, and make doc.  But although necessary, it's not clear that these would be 
sufficient.  For example, do these commands test musicxml.py?

If I could get some guidance on these issues, I'd be happy to take a stab at 
this work.

Thanks,

Carl