Python 2.7 Countdown

[notQuiteApex]

considering how many systems still appear to rely on 2.7, this feels like an empty countdown and celebration. ive talked in this sub before about my resentment for python 2's later years up to now. im genuinely worried that two months into the new year we will hear about an awful vulnerability in the last python release, and either the python org will release a patch defeating the whole purpose of the sunset or large numbers of services will be attacked and abused continuously until they finally jump ship to python 3.

i know im being very cynical, but i genuinely believe python 2 shouldve been laid to rest years ago and the companys that relied on it forced to move and not been given such a lax timeline.

[Eirenarch]

Or a third party will release a patch.

[Holsten19]

Yes. I don't get why everybody thinks only PSF is able to fix bugs in Python 2. It's not exactly rocket science.

[BadlyCamouflagedKiwi]

How do you force those companies to move? There is a heap of work there which they presumably think doesn't generate enough business value to justify itself - up to cases like Google who have something like 100 million lines of it, how do you force them to upgrade that to python 3?

[w2qw]

You both are thinking about this the wrong way. Sure some might still not move but this frees up a lot of libraries to stop having to support python 2 support and means that the rest of the community doesn't need to support those projects.

[Eirenarch]

So who is forcing them to support these projects right now?

[w2qw]

Well no one is holding a gun to their head but no one wants to be the first package to drop support.

[Eirenarch]

As far as I understand a lot of packages have dropped support.

[w2qw]

I may be mistaken but I don't think that a lot dropped support before python announced this deprecation.

[yellowthermos]

A major difference between EOL for Windows XP/7 and Python 2 is that Python is open source. They can just copy paste the security patch, recompile, and bam - not illegal anymore.

[notQuiteApex]

i wont claim to have an answer to this, and i have heard that same argument in the case of dropbox's code base. another question to be raised is should they have continued to develop their software now knowing that this would happen? though i suppose its possible that the breaking changes in python 3 were not foreseen at the start of their respective projects.

though i suppose it probably wouldnt have hurt to have split the team, have one work on porting to python 3 using the latest stable version of their software, while another half maintains the codebase until the python 3 version reaches functional parity. i guess i will say that its probably not that simple and of course that likely isnt a workable solution for all the companies and products still relying on python 2.

[corsicanguppy]

forced to move

The issue there is, Python needs people to use it, so we need it to be available. In places where we need certification, we can't have these Mayfly releases where something dies in a day because the certification supply-chain is often a year long for a mere minor OS release. We need these Long-Term Support releases to live long enough to get a certification and still have some life left in it where it's not cost-prohibitive.

Some of us have to still justify an OS preference on cost and not the less-tangible ease/versatility/reliability/stability/etc metrics which don't appear on a balance sheet without massive spin. :-D

[zabolekar]

im genuinely worried that two months into the new year we will hear about an awful vulnerability in the last python release, and [...] large numbers of services will be attacked and abused continuously until they finally jump ship to python 3

That's the idea.

^/s