[Python-Dev] The end of 2.7

martin at v.loewis.de martin at v.loewis.de
Sun Apr 7 09:44:42 CEST 2013


> Martin, you guys are shooting yourself in a foot. Almost noone uses
> python 3 in production, even at pycon, which is the more progressive
> crowd. There is a giant group of people using python that are not as
> vocal. While I bet some are using Python 3, Python 2 is incredibly
> popular for the "long tail" of libraries and applications. How much is
> 2.7 a burden? There are no major changes and it's pretty cool to
> consider it "done".

Indeed - hence I think it is just fine to stop applying bug fixes to it,
as well. People for whom it works fine today apparently don't run into any
significant bugs. They can happily continue to use it as-is for ten or more
years. It will not go away just when we reduce changes to security fixes.
It will remain available for download, the documentation will keep being
online, people can continue to ask questions about it on python-list, and
continue to get answers.

Stopping to apply bug fixes does not really *end* Python 2.7.

It's only that people who *do* run into bugs don't have the option anymore
that we will eventually publish a fixed release. Their options reduce to
- port to 3.x (particularly interesting if Python 3.x *already* fixed it)
- find a work-around
- maintain a bug fix locally
- do something else entirely (like abandoning Python)

People deserve to know our plans, so we really need to agree on them and
then announce them (see PEP 404). However, people (IMO) have no right to
expect us to maintain Python 2.7 until they migrate to 3.x. If we would do
that, they will never migrate.

Regards,
Martin




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