New ipaddress module in python3.3

Back in 2010 I packaged Google’s ipaddr module because I needed a light weight IP address manipulation library that supported both IPv4 and IPv6 and (at the time) python-subnettree was IPv4 only.  Well, ipaddr is all grown up now and included in python3.3 as the ipaddress manipulation module in the standard library.  You can find details, as well as some description of the differences, in PEP 3144.

I just converted one package that I’m upstream for to use either ipaddr (for python2.6/2.7/3.2) or ipaddress instead of some custom code.  It turned out to be pretty easy to make it work with either.  Other than the name, the only difference I ran into was the removal of the common, generic IPAddress and IPNetwork functions that are replaced by ip_address and ip_network.

…
-import ipaddr
+try:
+    import ipaddress
+except ImportError:
+    import ipaddr as ipaddress
…
–    address = ipaddr.IPAddress(ip)
–    if isinstance(address, ipaddr.IPv4Address):
+    try:
+        address = ipaddress.ip_address(ip)
+    except AttributeError:
+        address = ipaddress.IPAddress(ip)
+    if isinstance(address, ipaddress.IPv4Address):
…

Currently, python3-ipaddr has no reverse-dependencies in the archive (python-ipaddr does).  Once python3.2 is dropped from Jessie, I think I’ll drop the python3-ipaddr binary on the assumption people newly coding for python3.3 should use ipaddress.  The python-ipaddr module will stick around for use with python2.7.