[Python-Dev] The end of 2.7

[Maciej Fijalkowski]

On Sun, Apr 7, 2013 at 9:44 AM,  <martin at v.loewis.de> wrote:
>> 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.

No, they manage to work around issues. It doesn't mean there are no
bugs or bugfixes won't help. But I'm not going to argue with you, I
don't think you can be convinced about anything here.

>
> 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

As far as I remember python 3 was supposed to be a better language,
not just "the maintained version". It's such a bad idea to force
people to go through porting because 2.x is not maintained any more.
If they never migrate on the premises of python 3 being a better
language what does it say about python 3?

I cannot of course tell you what you should do in your free time
though, if you don't feel like doing anything in that area, fine.
We'll maintain the stdlib of Python 2.7 past the 2 year mark though.

Cheers,
fijal