Dmitri Maziuk writes:
The point was that the argument about MM3 having a long life expectancy "because python 3" is not in any way, shape, or form supported by the history of the python programming language to date.
*chortle* *In Mailman's experience* Python's backward compatibility record has been an annoyance because it's *too good*. Much of the time we were officially supporting *four* 2.x versions, and it would have been *five* at times except that we were conservative about supporting the most recent release. It was almost always trivial to do so. This policy of supporting old Python versions was quite painful at times, preventing us from taking advantage of new Python features. The only 2.x backward compatibility issue I can recall that bit Mailman was the introduction of true Booleans (yeah, that long ago), and that was easy to fix. Mark can probably tell a few stories.
Although the port of Mailman 3 to Python 3 took a couple of years, after that we had a spurt of rapid development, because Python 3 is a much better environment for development of new code, and because str- is-Unicode-inside made the email package much more reliable. A lot (not all, but a lot) of bugs were simply made impossible. We don't support as many versions of Python 3 (usually 2-3) because our current Mailman 3 user population is smaller, biased toward the beta tester type, and generally more sophisticated.
Arguing that MM3 itself is going to be supported because there's more that just Mark supporting it
Beside the point, actually. There are *many* people supporting MM2 users (including me and Jim P, for two prominent examples). But the patch rate has been near zero for *years*, and has definitely *not* included many of the patches I imagine Jim would want to include.
MM3, on the other hand, not only has three more or less active developers, it also has frequent releases including new features as well as bug fixes.
effectively boils down to "Mark will stop patching MM2". That's certainly possible, but maybe we should ask him instead of taking your word for it?
"There is none so blind as he who will not see" what is in the archives of mailman-users and mailman-developers many times. Mark hasn't set a sunset date, but soon he's going to Just Say No.