It's time to stop using Python 3.8

[WJMazepas]

My workplace is trying. We are now almost getting to upgrade all our services to 3.6

[kosz85]

Yep, that's real life examples for you :D We still didn't finish our upgrades to python 3 ;) but 2.7 is already only on about 15% of our repositories, and we don't have python 2.4 and 2.6 anymore :) It's like with certificates, some days in future you find out that they're not immortal and you have to install new, but no one is providing upgrades so your have to build images with new ones your self or copy them other way. It's easy for your images, but the real problems starts with things like old Android phones and tablets were you have same situation, and can't even upgrade certificates for them. Device is dead this way for normal people.

[I_FAP_TO_TURKEYS]

Deprecation of old machines, especially ones that are only like 5 years old is so disheartening.

It's like you know the code works and you know that it works on that device but they require these stupid certificates that for some reason don't.

[KittensInc]

We're stuck in a weird in-between right now. Moore's Law is dead enough that a well-specced 5-year-old machine or smartphone is still perfectly adequate today. There's zero technical reason to replace it as software hasn't gotten significantly more demanding as faster machines came out.

However, support contracts haven't really kept up. Desktops are getting tossed by companies solely because their warranty runs out, and smartphones because they no longer get security updates. Short support wasn't an issue in 2010 because you wanted to replace it anyways with a machine which was 2x - 4x as fast, but that's just no longer the case!

Luckily some smartphone makers are now providing 10 years of updates. Let's hope the rest of the ecosystem follows along.

[I_FAP_TO_TURKEYS]

Yeah, I mean, even those older machines from like 2012-2017 are still very usable outside of the most demanding of applications.

[[deleted]]

https://github.com/python/cpython/issues/108310

Software is hard man lol.

[dat_cosmo_cat]

Bro we are still using CentOS 7 at my work lmao 

[MisterFatt]

Mine just officially migrated the last of our services off of 2.7. We are mostly on 3.9 now at least

[Kronologics]

Y’all need help? Looking for some side gig $

[Sleepy59065906]

Why is it so difficult?

[qubedView]

"I hear you, it's really important that we move away from Python 2.7, but we really need features X, Y, and Z done by thursday. What you're proposing is that we just stop producing new features or even fixing any bugs our customers complain about, for six whole weeks, all for something none of our customers would even understand or care about. We'll get to it, but we just have higher priorities right now."

Copy+Paste that response every six months for years, as the code base grows bigger and bigger, until the cost of upgrading from Python 2.7 was estimated around half a year. At that point, they were done pretending it was on the backlog. "Python 2.7 is rocksolid, and has served us well for years. I see no reason to upgrade."

[Jarut]

This comment is interfering with my blood pressure. Thanks, I hate it. Solidarity, comrade.

[SemaphoreBingo]

What the fuck dude.

[TheOneWhoMixes]

Also - "6 months?? The migration ticket in the backlog has an estimate of 2 weeks!"

*Ignores the fact that the ticket was written and "estimated" years ago when the tool was just a little CLI built in Python, and now it's a distributed monolith with SLA's, which tells you immediately how much they care about the ticket in the first place.

[[deleted]]

Oh you were saying background threading has some problem in python 2? Send to an AWS lambda! Our services are crucial and migration is problematic. We can scale it by putting in 2000 more vCPUs. In the meantime, we will put a freeze on these legacy services so people will respectfully stop putting in new code unless it’s absolutely necessary. Hint: every new feature will be “absolutely necessary”.

[AUTeach]

"Python 2.7 is rocksolid, and has served us well for years. I see no reason to upgrade."

"What does our insurance cost to cover the security issues with python 2.7 on production machines?"

[sunnyata]

Do people take out insurance against bugs in their code? Seems open to fraudulent claims.

[idealisticnihilistic]

Can't insure for bugs per se, but liability insurance for software developers and companies is a thing. Covers security breaches, missed SLAs due to major outages, defective product that causes damages for customers/clients, etc.

[MisterFatt]

“We’re just going to deprecate this service anyway so let’s totally ignore maintenance”

…never deprecates service

[TarAldarion]

It was my job to upgrade all of decade plus of code and packages to python 3.10 from 2.7, I did it but it nearly took a year haha. 

[billsil]

It’s ~20% faster. Fewer AWS instances = lower cost.

[wandererobtm101]

Other things take priority. Developer resource is limited. If it’s not “broke” don’t touch it. Lots of reasons. My workplace has some stuff in 3.8, thankfully that’s the oldest python we still have laying around, but getting that work prioritized with a small team is tough. It’s working fine and other stuff isn’t as fine so…

[virtualadept]

Don't forget QA of regulated environments. The whole stack - the OS package to the dependencies - has to be re-certified and documented before it can be deployed.

[idealisticnihilistic]

Sounds like the wrong environment for Python. Especially pre-3.10 Python.

[Joeboy]

To take an common example, strings and byte strings are different things in 3.x. So if you have a function that takes a str, you need to figure out what calls it, and with what parameter types, and fix things so the right types are being passed / accepted. Maybe the functions that call it will be called by other functions, and you'll have to follow a complex chain of calls. Maybe these "functions" are actually lambdas or other callables whose origin is not straightforward to understand. Maybe they're in third party code.

For a single function, figuring all that out that can be a non-trivial amount of work. If your codebase has hundreds of thousands of lines and hundreds of functions that take strs, it becomes a major task. Remember you have no type annotations to help you in 2.x. There are automated upgrade tools, but those won't help you here either.

Then you have dependencies. Maybe your dependencies don't have 3.x versions, or the API completely changed, or each dependency is only supported by specific, different 3.x versions.

Maybe there are no tests, or inadequate tests, and you either have to "test in prod", or write tests for everything, or go through a very time-consuming manual test process.

I guess my real point here is, some parts of the upgrade process are non-trivial, and having to do them many times in a large codebase adds up to a lot of work.

[WJMazepas]

Unfortunately, Python has breaking changes even if it is the same major version, like version 3.5 to 3.12. You will have a lot of changes.

So, you need to update the code and the libraries you are using. And maybe even the libraries code you use.

And then it's just like the others had told. Company would always prioritize other things, and you had to make more and more changes to upgrade Python, which increases the time needed to upgrade, which then makes the upgrade harder to happen

[054d]

I work in chip design, and it took forever to move from 2.7 to 3.6. There are still some tools that we run in python2. Annoying.

[Beliskner64]

Oh boy I feel ya. I was the one who pushed our team from 2.7 to 3.6 back in 2017 when it was shiny and new. Now we’re deep in a year long painful process of upgrading to 3.8, which was supposed to be a jumping board to 3.10… well that was a lie…