That assumes any of us (BDFL included) are desperate to get it in production Right Now, which isn't true. However, backwards incompatibility is a tough pill to swallow and while Py3k is a cleaner, saner language it has still been a tough sell.
As far as I'm concerned (as a CPython developer), the 2.x branch can live as long as necessary. There is no reason to play games trying to push people to upgrade to 3.x. Those tactics piss people off and for good reason.
That said, I don't see this as a tactic to get people to upgrade. Python is an open source project and the developers get to choose what they will work on. If the Unladen Swallow guys want to merge into 3.x, that's their right. If someone else steps up to merge it into 2.x and support it, that's their right too.
Myself, I'm going to continue to fix bugs in the 2.x stream for the foreseeable future. I do plan on moving my applications to 3.x eventually though.
As a Cpython developer; you and I both know 2.7 is slated to be the final "big" release of python 2.x. Anything past that point will be only bug fix/security fixes.
Unladen would require a whole new 2.x release, which is not, and more than likely will not be planned. We're not playing games, we're putting features into 3k knowing full well we plan on putting 2.x out to pasture. We're making the selling points of Py3k porting much more compelling to library/framework/etc authors.
If someone wants to fork 2.7 and merge it with unladen, or better yet simply run the 2.x release of unladen-swallow up on google code, that's totally their prerogative, and I know some people will. From a feature standpoint though, this is a good think for 3k as it sits today.
I honestly thought py3k wasnt being sold. As of the last pycon, there was a lot of talk of 'slow and steady py3k adoption'. The general roadmap assumed by most people I interact with is: at some point someone will make a killer feature with py3k and that will be the tipping point. Until then, 2.x doesn't stop being awesome just cuz 3 around.
There has always been discussion about adding features to 3k to increase adoption speed. Even when unladen goes into 3k, which is probably the middle-to-end of this year, it's another year before major OS vendors pick it up, etc.
Nothing happens overnight, this is just something to incentivise possible porting efforts.
Python might not have a single "killer-app", but it has a killer ecosystem, which I learned to value higher.
Much of the joy in working with python comes from the "already written" effect. Libraries exist for almost any imaginable task, and it doesn't cease to surprise me how good the average code-quality is. It's extremely rare for me
to run into a foul egg, which is a pleasant change from the platforms I've previously worked with.
Up until now, it didn't seem like there were that many compelling reasons to try to jump to Python 3 - most of the changes were for correctness. Something like this gives a tangible reason to at least consider the pain of a major upgrade.
I thought Unladen Swallow had good reasons to be on 2.x, such as the fact that Google is on 2.x internally. Maybe Google's decided it's time to migrate?
This is pretty amazing news. Last I heard, I thought that UnladenSwallow was 2.x-only. Now it turns out that it's going into 3.x and there will be no 2.x Unladen. Wow.
Giving up! Quite the opposite, the goal the entire type was for Unladen Swallow to be merged back into Python itself, so everyone can benefit. Bringing it back into CPython gives it the potential for the most eyeballs. I don't know whether Google will continue to pay devs to work on it full time, but certainly the community won't let it languish!
