CodingGuidelines: add Python coding guidelines
These are kept short by simply deferring to PEP-8. Most of the Python
code in Git is already very close to this style (some things in contrib/
are not).
Rationale for version suggestions:
- Amongst the noise in [1], there isn't any disagreement about using
2.6 as a base (see also [2]), although Brandon Casey recently added
support for 2.4 and 2.5 to git-p4 [3].
- Restricting ourselves to 2.6+ makes aiming for Python 3 compatibility
significantly easier [4].
- Advocating Python 3 support in all scripts is currently unrealistic
because:
- 'p4 -G' provides output in a format that is very hard to use with
Python 3 (and its documentation claims Python 3 is unsupported).
- Mercurial does not support Python 3.
- Bazaar does not support Python 3.
- But we should try to make new scripts compatible with Python 3
because all new Python development is happening on version 3 and the
Python community will eventually stop supporting Python 2 [5].
- Python 3.1 is required to support the 'surrogateescape' error handler
for encoding/decodng filenames to/from Unicode strings and Python 3.0
is not longer supported.
[1] http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.version-control.git/210329
[2] http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.version-control.git/210429
[3] http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.version-control.git/214579
[4] http://docs.python.org/3.3/howto/pyporting.html#try-to-support-python-2-6-and-newer-only
[5] http://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0404/
Signed-off-by: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>