1.4 release series

[Barry Warsaw]

On Oct 26, 2015, at 10:05 PM, Olly Betts wrote:

>And that's really much too long - we've built up a pile of nice new features
>which it's hard for most people to use.
>
>I think we need to acknowledge that these aren't going to all get done, and
>we're much better off keeping a sensible interval between new release series
>- features can then make the next series after they're actually implemented.
>
>I'm going to make a start soon on going through the tickets and adjusting
>milestones.

Hi Olly,

This is good news!  One of the things we're eagerly awaiting are official
Python 3 bindings.

Just today we had an Ubuntu Online Summit session about our goal for Ubuntu
16.04 LTS.  We are going to drop Python 2.7 from all the 16.04 images.  While
Python 2.7 will still be available of course, by default you'll only get
Python 3.5[*].

As you probably know, we have apt-xapian-index in both Debian and Ubuntu, and
because we install that by default, we'll need to port it to Python 3.  That
of course will require the Python 3 Xapian bindings.  In Ubuntu, we have
python3-xapian1.3 as a convenience package for folks who want to start the
porting effort of their own applications, and I have started to look at
porting apt-xapian-index to this version.

But python3-xapian1.3 isn't in Debian so it means we'd have to carry a delta
in Ubuntu which is suboptimal.  The best outcome would be a new upstream
Xapian 1.4 with Python 3 bindings, along with an updated Debian package for
python3-xapian, which would then just be imported into Ubuntu.

Our drop-dead date for removing Python 2.7 is feature freeze on 18-Feb-2016
but as apt-xapian-index is probably the most complex porting task we have, I
want to begin this sooner rather than later.

Do you think it's realistic to expect a new Xapian release with Python 3
support in Debian say in the next month or so?  Do you have any other thoughts
about a Python 3 apt-xapian-index?  Would it need to be bilingual
(i.e. support Python 2 and 3 at the same time) or is a Python 3 only version
acceptable?

Cheers,
-Barry

[*] Currently we also have 3.4, but 3.5 is default and we'll soon be dropping
3.4 too.
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