[Python-Dev] The end of 2.7

[Georg Brandl]

Am 06.04.2013 23:02, schrieb Benjamin Peterson:
> Per my last message, 2.7.4 has at long last been released. I apologize
> for the long interval between 2.7.3 and 2.7.4. To create more
> determinism in the future, I will be soon updating PEP 373 with
> approximate dates of future 2.7 bugfix releases. I will be aiming for
> 6 month intervals.
> 
> This means we need to talk about how many more 2.7 releases there are
> going to be. At the release of 2.7.0, I thought we promised 5 years of
> bugfix maintenance, but my memory may be fuddled. At any rate, 2.7.0
> was released in July 2010, which currently puts us within a few months
> of 3 years of maintenance. Over the past year, I've been happy to see
> a lot of movement towards 3 including the porting of important
> codebases like Twisted and Django. However, there's also no doubt that
> 2.x is still widely used. Obviously, there will be people who would be
> happy if we kept maintaining 2.7 until 2025, but I think at this
> juncture 5 total years of maintenance is reasonable. This means there
> will be approximately 4 more 2.7 releases.
> 
> Thoughts?

I agree that keeping to 5 years of official maintenance releases is
reasonable at present.

However, in 2015 I can well imagine offers from group(s) in the community
to maintain the 2.7 branch with fixes ported from 3.x.  At that point,
we will have to decide how to treat releases from this "backports" branch.

Georg