> I don't think resolving compatibility issues is optional...
It is if you stay on 2 for production/qa and the bulk of new feature development in the meantime. Only CI (and any developers working on python 3 compat.) would be running 3 and only to provide reports of how compatible things are.
Only once the test suite passes would you swap QA to 3, start removing 2 compatibility code (i.e. whatever you've done to hack around handling strings) and eventually ship 3 to production.
Edit: The solution of "just switch to 3 then make it work" is exactly what they can't do because of (completely valid) business and political concerns. I think that if they were able to have a goal of some small percent of test progress on Python 3 per release - but continue to ship features - they would be able to find time to do the work if it's at all a priority, even if it took many many releases. If it's not at all a priority then maybe that's the one-sentence summary instead.
It is if you stay on 2 for production/qa and the bulk of new feature development in the meantime. Only CI (and any developers working on python 3 compat.) would be running 3 and only to provide reports of how compatible things are.
Only once the test suite passes would you swap QA to 3, start removing 2 compatibility code (i.e. whatever you've done to hack around handling strings) and eventually ship 3 to production.
Edit: The solution of "just switch to 3 then make it work" is exactly what they can't do because of (completely valid) business and political concerns. I think that if they were able to have a goal of some small percent of test progress on Python 3 per release - but continue to ship features - they would be able to find time to do the work if it's at all a priority, even if it took many many releases. If it's not at all a priority then maybe that's the one-sentence summary instead.