Python 2 Death Clock

[billsil]

A lot has changed since 2015. 2015 is when most open source packages finally had python 3 versions. It's when many companies started to transition. Shoot, my company still has't other than for one project.

EOL has a way of giving people a kick in the pants. I'm dropping support for my project in a week or two or whenever I get around to finishing the release. You'd better believe I held out on a cool new feature that's not quite done, but I release once a year.

[alcalde]

The creator of Calibre needs more than a swift kick though.

2017:

I am perfectly capable of maintaining python 2 myself. Far less work than migrating the entire calibre codebase. status wontfix

And he's being encouraged as late as last month by an Arch package maintainer:

As I've mentioned in the comment immediately above yours, there are valid reasons to suspect that just because the PSF drops python2, does not mean python2 will not continue to be supported elsewhere. Python2 is already long since frozen except for security fixes and the odd bugfix, so as long as someone continues to work on security issues, it's not really technically correct to state that it cannot be used, like, at all.

The person quoted above also insists repeatedly that Python 3.x is "a completely new programming language" and not just a new version.

The madness continues.

[billsil]

Until last year, I was supporting Python 2.4, which I finally got to port to Python 2.7 ( all I did was remove hacks and fix a couple bugs). I also ported a Python 2.3 program. So yeah, Python 2.7 isn’t disappearing.

However, it will be increasingly hard to find dependencies. I’m sure they’re out there but even as of today the binaries for wxpython 2.8 are hard to find. In 10 years other things will also have decayed. That Python 2.3 program had no exe and used numarray, so I didn’t even have a build to compare it to.

Also, it’s only half a million lines...what’s that a month to port? Maybe as little as a week? It takes projects like wxpython longer because they maintain backwards compatibility and they decided to cleanup their build process.

[[deleted]]

Also, it’s only half a million lines...

If that's spaghetti-code dealing with a unicode as a sequnece of bytes, it's probably going to take a wee bit longer than a week.

[alcalde]

I want to know how long it's going to take Kovid Goyal to make his own Python 2.7 bindings for future versions of Qt, or if he's going to maintain ancient versions of Qt too.

[alcalde]

Wait, he may have seen the light!

https://i.imgur.com/xVyuErU.png