[vbox-dev] Port vboxapi to Python 3

[Klaus Espenlaub]

Ilya,

On 22.04.2014 15:21, Ilya Kulakov wrote:
> Since the last patch I found 2 issues:
> - In one place I forgot to replace python2.6+ execpt syntax with python2.3 compatible
> - Forgot to replace all that __dict__ magic with python3 compatible setattr/getattr
>
> Updated patch is attached.

The relevant part of it (some unused code has been eliminated in the 
mean time, obsoleting a chunk of the patch) has been applied to trunk in 
https://www.virtualbox.org/changeset/54057/vbox

Thank you very much for the contribution and for your patience.

It's not yet decided if or how fast this will make it into VirtualBox 
4.3 - at the moment we're using the (python 2.x based) VirtualBox 
Validation Kit to see if there are any incompatibilities.

Note that this will give python3 support on Windows only. The changes 
cover only COM, because the Python JACOB middleware does not need any 
native libraries (which don't come with JACOB).

Getting this to work on all other platform means adapting PyXPCOM, which 
consists of both python and native library components 
(libpython*.*.{so,dylib}) which are built as part of VirtualBox. 
Currently there is no attempt at doing this for Python 3.x, so it won't 
be able to talk to the VirtualBox API. This explains the trouble Alexey 
Eromenko had when testing it on Linux.

More contributions are always welcome... if none are coming we'll try to 
somehow do the rest of the work, but there is no promise this will 
happen instantly.

Klaus

> Best regards,
> Ilya Kulakov