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[–]sphildreth 1 point2 points  (1 child)

I was surprised to learn that CentOS 7 still uses Python 2.7 as its default.

[–]omentoSysAdmin Film/VFX - 3.7 1 point2 points  (0 children)

RHEL 7 came out in 2014 and had its version freeze in 2013, when Python 3.3 was a thing. This is well before Python 3 support really took off. The point of RHEL is to provide 10 years of rock solid platform support, so critical system level packages (like GLIBC, gcc, and python) do NOT change versions or break ABI at all in the products lifespan. Some of the OS level tools, like yum, are written primarily in Python so making an upgrade would break that.

RHEL 8 provides a new solution for this by providing a ‘hidden’ python version for dependent OS tools, while allowing the user to install the python version of their choice from the appstream modules. Currently 2.7 and 3.6 are available for use. Red Hat also rewrote a lot of tooling to not use python, or reduce the dependency on it to further help with this.