[Numpy-discussion] Long term plans for dropping Python 2.7

[Julian Taylor]

On 15.04.2017 02:19, Charles R Harris wrote:
> Hi All,
> 
> It may be early to discuss dropping support for Python 2.7, but there is
> a disturbance in the force that suggests that it might be worth looking
> forward to the year 2020 when Python itself will drop support for 2.7.
> There is also a website, http://www.python3statement.org
> <http://www.python3statement.org/>, where several projects in the
> scientific python stack have pledged to be Python 2.7 free by that
> date.  Given that, a preliminary discussion of the subject might be
> interesting, if only to gather information of where the community
> currently stands.
> 
> Chuck
> 
> 

I am very against planning to drop it.
Numpy is the lowest part of the scipy stack so it is not our decision to
do so and we don't gain that much by doing so.
Lets discuss this in 3 years or when the distributions kick out
python2.7 (which won't happen before ~2022). There is no point doing so now.
Also PyPy does not plan on dropping 2.7 by that time.

Also before we even consider this we need to fix our python3 support.
This means getting the IO functions
(https://github.com/numpy/numpy/pull/4208) in order and adding a string
type that people are less reluctant to use than the 4 byte unicode we
currently offer.