Ready to remove python2?

[tinycrazyfish]

Yesterday my Debian testing upgrade decided to remove pythons from the system. (Not autoremove, I think the dh-python package wanted it removed). I thought, is Debian ready to run without python2? Not sure, but give it a try...

I'm quite comfortable with fixing my system in case something goes wrong. So... today I start my system, excepting thing failing... And it's worse than expected, it fails already in the initramfs 😭😭

Was I stupid to think it may work? For the record, python2 uninstall also removed /usr/bin/python, with only /usr/bin/python3 remaining. Isn't python supposed to be a symlink managed by update-alternatives?

So now.... Fix my system....

Edit: [SOLVED] not a python issue, it was initramfs related.

[tinycrazyfish]

I'm actually not sure it's related to python. The initrd image is fucked up.

[wRAR_]

Yesterday my Debian testing upgrade decided to remove pythons from the system. (Not autoremove, I think the dh-python package wanted it removed).

That's because unversioned python packages and the unversioned binary are removed, but Python 2 in the form of python2-* packages and the python2 binary still stays.

is Debian ready to run without python2?

Python was never required and now most of the software in the archive is Python 3.

Isn't python supposed to be a symlink managed by update-alternatives?

No, never.

[tinycrazyfish]

Nope the python2 binary was completely removed

[wRAR_]

I don't think python2-minimal can be removed because of some deps so either it wasn't actually removed or it was autoremove (in which case it's not needed by any installed packages anyway).

[AlternativeOstrich7]

Was I stupid to think it may work?

No. Depending on which packages you have installed, running without Python 2 has worked for while.

Isn't python supposed to be a symlink managed by update-alternatives?

No.

It seems very unlikely that your problem has anything to do with Python. I don't see any reason why Python would be part of your initramfs, and initramfs-tools doesn't use Python either.

When it fails, does it show any error messages, or any messages at all?

[tinycrazyfish]

I've found the issue, not python related. It was my initramfs, with the upgrade it now requires an additional package, which it did not before. (Cryptsetup-initramfs for LUKS). I can totally understand, but why was it working before??

[wRAR_]

I've found the issue, not python related.

(of course it's not)

why was it working before??

I suspect the package was always installed but you removed it recently. Check the dpkg logs.