================= PYTHON 3 SUPPORT ================= Current Python 3k support in SQLAlchemy is provided by a customized 2to3 script which wraps Python's 2to3 tool. This document will refer to the Python 2.6 interpreter binary as "python26" and the Python 3.xx interpreter binary as "python3". To build the Python 3K version, use the Python 2.6 interpreter to run the 2to3 script on the lib/ directory, and optionally the test/ directory. The -w flag indicates that the new files should be written. python26 sa2to3.py ./lib/ ./test/ -w You now have a Python 3 version of SQLAlchemy in lib/. Running Tests ------------- The unit test runner, described in README.unittests, is built on Nose, and uses a plugin that is ordinarily installed using setuptools entry points. At the time of this writing setuptools isn't available for Python 3 although the "Distribute" project does seem to provide support. Additionally, Nose itself is only available in an old version for Python 3, which is available at http://bitbucket.org/jpellerin/nose3/ . To run the unit tests using the old version of nose and without the usage of setuptools, use the "sqla_nose.py" script: python3 sqla_nose.py When running with Python 3, lots of debug output is dumped to the console. This is due to hacking around the old version of Nose to support the SQLAlchemy test plugin without setuptools (details at http://groups.google.com/group/nose-dev/browse_thread/thread/c6a25531baaa2531).