[Python-Dev] The end of 2.7

Nick Coghlan ncoghlan at gmail.com
Mon Apr 8 02:59:18 CEST 2013


On Mon, Apr 8, 2013 at 12:58 AM, Gregory P. Smith <greg at krypto.org> wrote:
> You're not looking at it from the users perspective.  They see:
>
> "we are pleased to announce that RHEL 4 will be supported until the year
> 3325"
>
> and continue to use everything that it ships with and only that.  its their
> own loss for not investing in maintaining infrastructure of their own rather
> than investing in a support contract from their vendor but it is a valid
> choice none the less.  it has nothing to do with what python-dev chooses to
> do release wise.

Right, people pay companies like Red Hat* good money to support
ancient versions of open source software. Upstream doesn't want to do
that (because it's tedious and not at all interesting), and *they
don't have to*. If people want things that volunteers aren't
interested in providing, then they have the option to pay to get the
software they want on the platforms they want (note that in the later
parts of a supported product's life, even we don't support running
ancient versions of RHEL directly on new hardware - we only support
running it as a VM inside a supported hypervisor that supports the new
hardware).

* In case anyone in the thread isn't already aware of my multiple
perspectives on this issue, note that I work on internal tools
development for Red Hat these days.

> We don't need to close the 2.7 branch to commits and bug fixes.  Ever.  But
> most of us will stop caring about making changes to it at some point.

+1000

> For
> me that point is after 3.4.

In terms of most of the stuff I work on that isn't a new feature, it's
either obscure enough, different enough between 2.x and 3.x or close
enough to the "new feature" line that I don't really care about
getting it changed in 2.7. So for me personally, the "stop worrying
about fixing 2.7" point is mostly passed already (fixing aspects of
the 2.7 *ecosystem* is still thoroughly on my radar, but that's about
improving external tools, not CPython itself).

Cheers,
Nick.

--
Nick Coghlan   |   ncoghlan at gmail.com   |   Brisbane, Australia


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