[Xapian-devel] xapian bindings for Python 3.0?

[Olly Betts]

On Tue, Apr 28, 2009 at 05:40:03PM +0200, Kelm, Peter  ST/HZA-TG wrote:
> Xapian version: 1.0.11
> Platform: Windows XP / Visual Studio Express 2008

As the README file for xapian-bindings 1.0.11 says:

    Python          Requires Python 2.2 or later.  Python 3 probably won't be
		    supported by 1.0.x, but will by 1.1.x.  [...]

The 1.1.0 development release nominally has Python 3 support, but it's
currently marked as experimental as hasn't had much testing and the
wrapped API may change a little still, and also it failed to build with
Python 3.0.1 when Richard tried shortly before the release.  This ticket
is tracking the status of Python 3 support:

http://trac.xapian.org/ticket/346

If you (or anyone else) want to help out, that would be great.

We're not currently intending to add Python 3 support to 1.0.x, although
once Python 3 support in 1.1.x has stabilised, if someone sufficiently
motivated were to come up with a suitable patch for backporting it to
1.0.x we'd certainly consider it.

But note that a newer version of SWIG is required to generate the Python
3 wrappers than the one we're currently using for 1.0.x, which is
potentially disruptive to the other SWIG-generated bindings.  So either
you'd need to prove that any differences in the wrappers for other
languages are harmless or beneficial, or adjust the build system to use
a different SWIG install for Python 3.

Cheers,
    Olly