Hi all,

I had occasion today to try to duplicate a Python 2 application on a fresh install of Debian 12 "Bookworm". It was a bit of a lift, and I realized just how deprecated Python 2 is. Properly speaking, Python 2 "is no more", "has ceased to be", "bereft of life, it rests in peace", and adding insult to injury "this is an ex-parrot".

Specifically, there's no Python 2 .deb, and I'm not even sure Python 2 branches are still in the GitHub repo (probably, but it was easier to grab the tarball). Ditto, no .deb for OpenSSL 1.1.1w. There's no pip or ensure_pip, and get-pip.py no longer supports Python 2. Cloned the pip repo, but then setup.py doesn't work without setuptools. Cloned that one too, fortunately it has a bootstrapper so that built and installed, and then so did pip. Then it turned out I only needed one non-stdlib package, dnspython -- which doesn't support Python 2 anymore, so built that one from git, too. I have to wonder if pip is usable at all, since you'll need to specify the most recent version of each package that still supports Python 2, assuming PyPI keeps them around.

So ... make a copy of your Ubuntu 16 distribution disks and your current site-packages, you're gonna need them if you ever need to migrate your Mailman 2 to a new host.

In case you're wondering, I kept careful notes of the process as I got it working, including archive and repo URLs and release tags to checkout. I'll post it to the wiki at some point.

Of course, you can avoid all this by migrating to Mailman 3! It's less work. :-)

Regards,