Comment 57 for bug 893091

I'm following up to this thread because I'd like to resurrect dbus-python support for Python 3. I've got an experimental branch in bzr. lp:~barry/python-dbus/py3. I've read this bug thread and taken a look at the various patches posted here, and my branch does make some different choices.

- Python 2.6, 2.7, and 3.2 are supported, nothing older.
- I did original make the various ascii-string types as bytes subclasses, and while I was able to get test-standalone working, the cross-tests have had various difficult to track down failures. I'm going to do another branch where they are str/unicode subclasses and see if that makes things better. Conceptually, to me they want to be bytes subclasses (for many of the reasons John originally pointed out), but practically speaking, it may be easier and less disruptive to users to make them strings. We'll see!
- I have a very nice PYPORTING.rst file which describes lots of the issues porting code in general, and dbus-python in particular.
- make check doesn't run to successful completion for me, even from the git head <https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=43303>. This is on Ubuntu 11.10. I still haven't tracked this down yet.

I'm fairly motivated to see a dbus-python ported to Python 3. We're making a similar push to Python 3 and our Qt/KDE users are demanding it. I'm keeping Python 2.6 support because there are only a few wormarounds different than Python 2.7, but we only need 2.7 and 3.2 support. I'm really not interested in Python 2 < 2.6 or Python 3 < 3.2. I'd like to know though whether Simon is philosophically opposed to integrating Python 3 support into upstream or not.